Rethinking how energy trading systems work

Every day, suppliers, generators, traders and power exchanges buy and sell electricity worth millions of pounds. For that market to function at its best, critical trading data needs to flow just as quickly as the energy it represents. One of the systems responsible for that is ECVAA, the Energy Contract Volume Allocation Agent, through which market participants notify Elexon of the electricity volumes they have traded.

ECVAA has operated largely unchanged since its introduction in 2001. While it has continued to serve the market effectively, many of its underlying processes were designed for a very different environment. As trading has become faster and the market moves towards real-time operation, participants increasingly find themselves with contracted positions that lag behind the market, submission acknowledgements that arrive too late to act on, and critical processes that struggle outside normal business hours.

Rather than making assumptions about what should change, Elexon wanted to understand how different stakeholders use ECVAA today, where friction exists, and which opportunities would create the greatest value for the market.

Softwire designed and facilitated a two-day Innovation Lab at Elexon's offices, bringing together the people who use ECVAA every day: trading parties, power exchanges, software engineers, data specialists and BSC experts.

Day one focused on the problem space. Working in collaborative, cross-disciplinary groups, attendees mapped the friction in their experience of ECVAA, exploring the underlying needs and root causes of their pain points to identify the core problem areas worth pursuing.

On the second day, Softwire's service designers, user researchers and technical consultants worked alongside attendees to turn those problem areas into practical solution concepts. Using Design Thinking frameworks, each group selected a concept to develop, stress-testing its practicalities and technical feasibility before presenting to a panel of industry experts.

This structure was designed with innovation at its heart. By resisting the urge to jump straight to solutions on day one, we created space for new thinking rather than incremental fixes.

The Innovation Lab provided Elexon with valuable insights from different user groups to design a compelling blueprint for the next phase of ECVAA's evolution. Three themes emerged across the concepts developed:

Together, the concepts gave Elexon a clearer picture of where investment would have the greatest impact, and a set of user-backed proposals to bring to their board.