SHARP project: A milestone in the power digitization journey
A new IT-infrastructure and state-of-the-art-system for power dispatch operations
On June 29, the SHARP project delivered its second and final go-live: The Power Dispatch Business, RuhrEnergie, IT teams, and vendor Kisters realized the successful implementation of an IT-solution for the Central European power market to steer Uniper’s units and deliver its balancing energy.
What is the SHARP project?
The System Harmonization Project (SHARP) has the purpose to renew the critical 24/7 systems for Uniper’s commercial power asset optimization, production planning and asset steering. In November 2020, the Volue SmartEnergy was implemented to provide the asset optimizations. Now, in the “ASM”-workstream of the project (“Asset Steering and Monitoring”), the new real-time dispatch system from vendor Kisters, went live. The Kisters system replaced the last part of the more than fifteen-year-old Siemens Sinaut system. For the business, this is a huge change.
“The delivery of the Kisters system is a major milestone in developing our Short-Term Trading and Dispatching landscape. With the new system and support setup we leverage efficiencies across Uniper functions”, says Paul Baltes, Senior Vice President Power Operations at Uniper. “Even more, the latest renewals in our trading program play a key part in the power digitization journey and enable further growth in new businesses. Finally, we want to thank all involved colleagues enabling us to go-live.”
The biggest benefits
The project team, consisting of around 40 people from the power dispatch business, RuhrEnergie, Uniper IT and vendor Kisters, not only moved the power dispatch operations into a brand new state-of-art system, the team also renewed the complete infrastructure. Looking at compliancy to internal and external security audits, it was quite important to fulfil these requirements. The new setup is fully redundant, running in two separate RuhrEnergie datacenters, roughly 5 km apart, with two full system nodes running per location.
“Dispatch is the core and critical business activity which requires the utmost stable IT system with highest availability”, says Ulrich Hartstang, Head of Dispatch Operations Germany and EE. “The system is operated 24/7 by the shift team to steer and monitor our asset portfolio and to provide ancillary services to the Grid Operators. The project delivered a solution we can truly work with and secures our operations for the next years.”
The long process
The requirements analyses and implementation phase of SHARP ASM already started in 2018. “The project took over four years. This was longer than anticipated, because of increasing requirements during the implementation phase, external impacts, and quality challenges. Throughout the project we were able to functionally and technically improve the solution to cope with Uniper’s needs”, says Christian Renders, SHARP Program Manager.
The great persistency and teamwork by Business, RuhrEnergie, IT, and the partnership with vendor Kisters delivered a very good and stable solution. But being live doesn’t mean that the team is done. During the first period of use, constant monitoring of services is ongoing. “We will for sure run into some issues, and we are prepared to tackle them”, says Christian Renders.
