Drax Group deploys Solace to improve its IT infrastructure

Having converted two-thirds of Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire to use sustainable biomass instead of coal, Drax has become the largest decarbonisation project in Europe and the biggest single site renewable power generator in the UK. It has also paved the way for the company to become carbon negative by 2030 by deploying negative emissions technology bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) - permanently storing millions of tonnes of CO2 a year.

Drax needed a unified, real-time view of its data to maximise the efficiency and the environmental footprint of its supply chain and energy production. Solace is a key element of Drax’s Data and Integration Hubs, which allow easy access to data sources, wherever they are. Solace’s event mesh distributes data between applications and devices in real-time, running across divisions and on-premises data centres as well as public clouds. Solace’s event mesh helps customers’ data move in real-time, affecting the pertinent applications and ensuring information across the enterprise is up to date, every minute. With this capability, Solace will help Drax to dynamically manage demand fluctuations, storage, and energy delivery across the UK.

Drax Group’s new architecture is designed to move at pace and be more cost-effective, extract functionality from its legacy systems without having to rip-and-replace, and leverage data across the whole company.

“We’re proud of the fact that by making information from across their operation available to the systems and people that need it in real-time, that Solace’s technology gives Drax the ability to quickly respond to the constantly evolving current and future needs of the UK’s energy system,” said Michael Hayward from Solace.

Mark Leonard, Director of IT at Drax Group, said: “Having efficient IT infrastructure is key to delivering our purpose of enabling a zero carbon, lower cost energy future for our business customers. Solace’s services have enabled us to improve user experience and drive operational efficiencies - we can access, transform, and utilise our data wherever and whenever we want through the integration hub.”

In addition, Drax is using Solace’s event management solution PubSub+ Event Portal, which helps it gain better transparency and control of its event-driven architecture (EDA) by adding the capability to design, catalog, visualise and govern its event streams.

The energy industry is increasingly seeing the need to balance power demand and supply, to have real-time updating of commodity prices which influence purchasing decisions, and to help multiple systems interact to provide access, security, IT authorisations, and a host of other processes on which the smooth running of a company depends.