The Norwegian Energy Certificate System (NECS) is a registry for issuing and tracking green energy certificates – the European Guarantees of Origin and Norwegian-Swedish El certificates. Unicorn Systems delivered it for Statnett as an implementation of the Certigy product. The goal was to provide Statnett customers with best-in-class user experience and flexibility with outstanding performance and security, both via the human user interface and the modern and easy-to-use API for machine-to-machine integration.
Transmission System Operator in the Norwegian Energy System
Statnett is a state enterprise owned by the Norwegian government through the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. Statnett’s mission is to secure power supply through operations, monitoring, and preparedness, to facilitate the realisation of Norway’s climate objectives, and to oversee value creation for our customers and society overall.
Statnett is also the national issuing body for energy certificates and a founding member of the Association of Issuing Bodies. Thanks to Norway’s prevailing electricity production from renewable sources (98% from hydroelectric plants), more than 140 TWh of green energy are certified each year, representing around 20% of all energy certified in Europe, thus making Statnett registry the largest in Europe.
Before the new NECS could be delivered to Statnett, it was forced to deal with the various drawbacks caused by its preceding solution. First, there was the application’s lack of speed both on the user screens (where some operations would take over ten minutes to complete) and on the backend processes.
A good example of this was certificate issuing, one of the key regular business processes of each registry, which became a tedious operation that even required a full outage lasting several hours.
Furthermore, the user described the solution as not being flexible or user-friendly. The screens only provided fixed, pre-configured views on the data without any flexibility for the user, and complex filters had to be set every time the user entered a screen.
The applied technologies also gave the solution an outdated appearance with zero option to provide any modern integration capabilities.
Fast and Reliable
Best-in-class user experience and flexibility simplify the daily tasks of the end users, resulting in the reduced involvement of Statnett resources. We’ve worked to significantly save end users’ time so they can focus more on their business and less on getting the system to function as it should.
This support for multiple certificate schemes enables the European Guarantees of Origin and the Norwegian-Swedish Elcertificates to operate in parallel, and this support can easily be extended in the future to other certificate types, including gas, heating, and cooling.
This SaaS delivery saves Statnett money otherwise spent on infrastructure and decreases its operational, administration, and maintenance costs.
Benefits
● Outstanding performance and scalability
● Highest level of security and OWASP compliance
● Modern micro-service architecture and REST APIs
Functionality, Flexibility, and Performance
The project’s outcome is a modern certificate registry, providing Statnett customers with an up-to-date and responsive GUI with full flexibility for the end users. Users can freely and easily customise the screens by adding or removing columns they want to see, changing the order of the columns, and sorting and filtering. The custom changes can be stored as save views, which can then be quickly switched and/or shared with other users.
User access is enabled by a simple login (optionally with multifactor authentication), which also securely prevents any unauthorised access to customer data. Thanks to the micro-service architecture, the particular functionalities can be scaled as needed without influencing one another. This all results in the above-mentioned process of certificate issuing taking only 20 minutes or less during regular daily operations, without the users even noticing its execution. The REST API offered by the system is easy to use and allows the customers to simply integrate the NECS functions into their environments and automate them.
The Solution Serves our Customers’ Needs
NECS is a certificate management system for issuing and tracking the Guarantees of Origin for commodities. It’s a flexible solution supporting multiple certificate schemes, covering the whole certificate lifecycle, starting with issuing, transfers, exports, and imports, all the way up to cancellations.
It’s built using the Unicorn Application Framework – a platform for developing cloud-ready mobile-first applications and information systems with a rich user interface, based primarily on modern web technologies.
It utilises the micro-service architecture, meaning the overall solution has been divided into several sub-applications: User Interface (GUI), Certificates, Transparency, Integrations and APIs, Transactions, Metered Data, Finance, and Master Data.
NECS is provided as a solution-as-a-service (SaaS), deployed and operated in the Unicorn cloud.
NECS has been developed in cooperation with Statnett as an implementation of the Unicorn standard Certigy product; see more on Certigy.
“At Statnett, we’re very pleased with our new registry solution, which we believe sets a new business standard. The first months after go-live have already shown that this solution serves our customers’ needs and that the system provides the functionality, flexibility, and performance expected from a modern IT solution. We’re very satisfied with the cooperation with Unicorn, and we’re looking forward to working together in further developing and extending the new system in the years to come.” – Ole Jacob Hoyland, Director of Market Operations at Statnett
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