Kinnect Insights Solution service
The Insights Solution is a cloud based data platform. It builds on the current industry-renowned BMRS platform and will provide a richer, more up to date and detailed data service.
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Video introducing the Insights Solution
This video explains how the Elexon Kinnect Insights Solution forms part of our digital platform and builds on data currently provided via the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (BMRS) providing state of the art data provision and APIs.
How it relates to you
Our vision is to build on Elexon’s data capabilities so that the Insights Solution becomes the ‘go’ to platform for the GB energy industry. Our new Insights Solution will use cloud-based services to receive, process and publish data for the benefit of our customer, stakeholder and the industry.
Elexon Kinnect is a flexible and scalable digital platform that will deliver two further functions for BSC Parties:
- Customer Solution – providing access for customers wanting to manage their company information
- Settlement Solution – performing scalable, flexible and modular Settlement operations
- More about the Elexon Kinnect platform
How to access the Insights Solution
The data on the Insights Solution is accurate and valid, equivalent to the data used on the BMRS.
Benefits of the Insights Solution
The Insights Solution will re-architect the existing BMRS to take advantage of the data platform that underpins the Settlement and Customer Solutions and it will enhance our understanding of data by bringing together data that is currently siloed in the monolithic Agent applications.
By using cloud infrastructure, it will mean an improvement in operational performance, less unplanned outages and a reduction in maintenance; ultimately enabling faster change for BMRS industry data.
Through an improved customer digital interface and experience, the Insights Solution will mean customers and stakeholders can do their own ad hoc analysis of data using on-demand services to provide them with invaluable insights of their own data and that of the industry. We will also improve data visualisation on the platform by integrating Power BI.
By incorporating all of the recommendations from the Energy Data Taskforce, it will support our open data philosophy and remove the silos of data, allowing the industry to gain valuable understanding of the enhanced analytics and insights.
We will also be looking to digitalise our guidance on BMRS data and how to access API.
The Insights Solution will build on the current industry-renowned BMRS platform, by providing a richer, more up to date and detailed data service. Access to data will play an essential role in the industry as it will help our customers develop new products and services more quickly.
We are committed to open data principles across the BSC and the new Insights Solution will provide a vital, free information service to the industry.
Background to the project objectives
Our Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (BMRS) serves to provide industry parties with operational data relating to the GB Electricity Balancing and Settlement arrangements. BMRS is used extensively by market participants to help make trading decisions and understanding market dynamics, acting as a prompt reporting platform as well as a means of accessing historic data.
Elexon introduced API data access in 2015 to access data from BMRS. Since then, the number of users has increased considerably. There were around 7 million daily requests to the BMRS API service in 2022/23, and the number of individual users has risen to around 90,000.
BMRS is an ageing platform and it is difficult to deliver updates to it at pace, to meet the needs of our customers for new data or functionality. The Insights Solution also offers a far more visual data service compared with the BMRS. It is also much easier for our customers to to interpret and customise data on the Insights Solution.
The main drawbacks of BMRS are also that:
- It is difficult to make changes to the platform, which means increasingly higher maintenance, licensing and support costs
- It is more costly and time consuming to make changes to the existing platform or to deliver new services
- There is a decline in operational performance and an increase in the amount of time it takes to fix the BMRS if there is an unplanned outage or problem