About Eviny Fornybar
Eviny Fornybar, a 100-year-old, renewable energy company, is part of the publicly-owned Eviny Group with its ~1300 employees in Norway. Eviny operates 39 hydropower plants across seven watercourses on Norway’s west coast, produces 7.7 terawatt hours of electricity annually, and sells mainly on the Nord Pool Power Exchange.
Challenges
The energy market in which Eviny was operating was complex. Eviny needed to modernize and optimize its power plant operations to generate electricity at the most optimal time and at the best price available from the Nord Pool Power Exchange, whose pricing offers could change from moment to moment.
The trading market featured multiple trading models such as next day and intraday.
Hourly and 15-minute electricity trading contracts intensified the need for high volumes of information-rich data exchange with low latency and highly reliability.
As a result of these trading demands, Eviny needed to constantly adjust its planning and control systems. Coordinating availability among plants and the best exchange price in very short windows of time required:
Real-time data processing and decision-making
Historical data storage for analysis, compliance and innovation.
In addition, Eviny needed to maintain strict regulatory control of its own data while streamlining infrastructure management
Technology Environment
Initially, Eviny implemented Apache Kafka and Redpanda for its critical data streaming requirements. After encountering significant complexity resulting in operational challenges, Eviny selected NATS as the foundational technology for its future architecture. After a successful pilot with NATS, Eviny decided to deploy its production systems with the NATS-based Synadia Platform's "Bring Your Own Cloud" service, allowing Eviny to focus on its application tier and offload the streaming infrastructure management to Synadia.
Synadia Platform
Today, Synadia Platform has become the backbone of Eviny’s data infrastructure, resulting in a more efficient and scalable solution.
Eviny deployed a three-node Synadia cluster in Eviny’s own Azure-based infrastructure, ensuring compliance with government regulations that required maintaining full access/control over its data and its security.
The first implementation of Synadia Platform was focused on algorithmic trading.
Synadia Platform transported data on what energy can be bought and sold from Eviny’s internal systems to Eviny’s algorithmic trading engine (see Figure 1), which connects to the Nord Pool Trading Exchange.
Figure 1: Synadia Platform with NATS JetStream: Real-time messaging connectivity and persistence for Eviny’s mission-critical algorithmic energy trading at scale
Synadia Platform’s event-driven architecture replaced Eviny's batch-oriented processing for real-time data processing.
Synadia Platform with its data and message persistence across nodes provided durable streaming and key-value store for real-time aggregation of trading data for both long-term storage and live use (see Figure 2) .
Figure 2: Synadia Platform with NATS JetStream: Transporting Eviny’s raw data (price, weather, sensor data, for example) from internal data sources to long-time storage and enriched/standardized data for live use
Results
With Synadia Platform, Eviny modernized its messaging infrastructure to meet the demands of the high-powered Nord Pool trading exchange, as well as possible future impacts like AI. Synadia Platform provided Eviny with both simplicity and flexibility, replacing multiple solutions and reducing operational and system complexity among its 39 hydroplants. Eviny also achieved real-time connectivity between Eviny’s management systems for power plants and the trading platform, while Eviny’s data retention and security needs were enabled with Synadia “Bring Your Own Cloud” and data persistence with NATS JetStream.
Increased developer productivity: Eviny’s developers and data scientists across 3 teams could focus on the core business rather than managing Eviny’s streaming infrastructure.
Simplicity of Use: Eviny could leverage a single platform that did many things including subject-based filtering, pub-sub and request-reply, for example.
Reduced latency: Eviny’s data exchange now was in milliseconds, sometimes microseconds.
Improved operational efficiency: Eviny could quickly adjust its energy planning to take advantage of demand/opportunities on exchange markets.
Increased trading efficiency: Eviny optimized trading opportunities and pricing with thousands of micro-trades per hour.
Fault-tolerant and reliable: Eviny experienced zero data loss with NATS JetStream data/message persistence for energy data and time-sensitive trades.
