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BETTA Data Exchange with the Scottish Utilities Project for National Grid Transco (NGT)

In April 2005 the British Electricity Transmission and Trading Arrangements project (BETTA) was implemented to create a single wholesale electricity market covering England, Wales and Scotland. Changes had already occurred in England and Wales; ownership and generation of electricity networks was largely separated from generation and supply in 2001.

The key impact of BETTA was that NGT as the system operator took over operation of the two Scottish transmission networks, while the owners (Scottish Power and Scottish and Southern Electricity) remained responsible for maintaining and developing them. The new arrangements required that NGT could monitor selected telemetry data collected by the two power utility PI systems and their interface software. All these PI systems and interfaces were developed and installed by Capula. This data had to travel the length of the country and it was crucial that it was always available; otherwise NGT would be operating Scottish circuit breakers while effectively 'blind'.

Capula simultaneously managed two projects to achieve the changeover. Firstly, each of the two Scottish Power Utilities, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) and Scottish Power (SP), needed their PI systems to be migrated to high resilience, dual redundant, hot PI servers, geographically separated across Scotland. This also gave disaster recovery capability. Capula is the only developer of PI related applications in the world that can offer a Hot Standby Dual Redundant PI system (called RODA – Resilient Operational Data Archive).

Secondly, Capula developed a bespoke OPC/Inter-control Centre Communications Protocol (ICCP) interface for BETTA data exchange between NGT and the two Scottish Utilities. This was itself a dual redundant pair of interface boxes, with automated failover built in.

Delivery timescales were high profile but Capula met the Government's timescales and the projects were a great success.