The First Twelve Months of Empire
Transforming Energy Trading with Empire - Part two of a three part series
An introduction to the series
In a new three-part series, we’re diving into the complete story of Empire. Part one explores the internal and external drivers that led to the creation of the award-winning trading and nomination platform, as well as the journey to design and deploy the platform in just 18 months. Part two explores the platform’s first twelve months in the market and part three will explore what the future holds for Empire.
The launch was only the beginning
“Once Empire had been launched, we were never going to simply stop there”, explains BritNed Commercial Operations & Planning Manager, Nils Teipel, as he begins to reflect on the successful first twelve months of the platform.
“As a customer-centric organisation, designing and delivering Empire to the market was only the beginning of what would come over the course of the next few years. Looking at how we could develop and further refine this brand-new platform to give our customers greater choice, convenience and control was paramount.”
Since its launch on 19 September 2023, Empire has continued to break the interconnector trading platform mould with, says Nils, “incremental improvements being constantly made to continuously improve the experience for customers and meet their needs as the market continues to evolve.”
Twelve months on since Empire was launched following a strategic partnership between BritNed and Supercharge, the platform has allocated 6194GW of Day Ahead and Intraday capacity with a total Allocation Revenue of €13.9M, and 14191GW of Long-Term capacity with €100.9M Allocation Revenue. The total Flow instructed by Empire was 4515GWh, which is equivalent to powering approximately 1.4M households every single year.
So how have Nils and his team ensured they are consistently developing what is already a hugely well-received product?
As a customer-centric organisation, designing and delivering Empire to the market was only the beginning of what would come. We quickly shifted focus from new product development to existing product improvement.
A shift in focus to continuous product development
“To maintain our innovative approach, ensuring we kept the same momentum we put into Empire’s design and launch (from concept to delivery in just 18 months) over the first 12 months of its life was crucial”, he explains.
“We quickly shifted focus from new product development to existing product improvement – constantly looking at ways we could improve the platform for our customers to ensure their trading activity is as efficient and user-friendly as possible. To aid this transition, we prioritised keeping our internal team and the developer team at Supercharge together post-launch, ensuring the consistency and fast processing of the next implementations.”
Just 12 months from its launch, Empire has already upgraded from the launch version 1.0 through to version 4.0 and the team have implemented 39 releases and 338 subtasks to add 128 new features – with customer feedback central to further developing the platform over the past year.
Nils explains: “We surveyed our customers three months after launching Empire to the market and received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Additionally, over the course of 2024 we have hosted several customer review meetings to gather further feedback on the platform as a whole, and specific auction products, to ensure we can balance qualitative and quantitative feedback to inform our product development roadmap.”
“Many of the features we have added are solely focused on making Empire that much easier for our customers to use”, Nils explains. “For example, auction details now auto-refresh more frequently when on the screen, there are additional filters to filter the auctions a customer has bid in instead of seeing the ones they haven’t participated in, and they can tag a personal trader bid ID to each bid to distinguish between different bids from the same trading house.
“We’ve also made other relatively simple updates but ones that save so much time for users, such as improving copy and paste functionality to save time in nomination and bid processes, changing the auction calendar to be a subscribe URL to always stay up to date with the live auction schedule, and enabling Day Ahead and Intraday auction results to be downloadable via XML.”
Nikolett Szabo, Project Manager at Supercharge added: “The first 12 months were everything we could wish for: smooth operation, great feedback, strong enthusiasm within the industry. We certainly were aiming for a great product, pushing all boundaries and giving the best of all our expert team members, and we feel satisfied and rewarded with where Empire is now. The feedback and customer engagement have been overwhelmingly positive—everyone is excited about the new features and what’s yet to come. We’re thrilled to see such a rewarding response from market participants.“
Many of the 128 new features we have added over the past 12 months are solely focused on making Empire that much easier for our customers to use.
The importance of the Empire Helpdesk
The dedicated Empire Helpdesk – available 24/7 for customers – has also been crucial in supporting BritNed customers to adopt the new system and maximise all its benefits, as well as supporting a superior user experience. BritNed provides continuous training for the Helpdesk team to ensure their knowledge develops in parallel with Empire. Every new agent also goes through an assessment process which they need to pass before joining a shift pattern.
Nils explains: “The Empire Helpdesk has received over 1,100 calls over the past 12 months, each one giving us the opportunity to connect on a more personal level with our customers and help them achieve the very best from the platform. As part of our quality assurance processes, we listen back to recorded calls to identify any areas of weakness and adapt agent training as appropriate. Again, this all links back to us placing the customer at the heart of Empire to ensure they reap every single benefit it has to offer. We’ve all experienced frustrations with a service where we know life would be simpler and easier if we could just speak with a human, which is why the Empire Helpdesk is an important part of the user experience we’ve designed. Ensuring this is a high-quality service is very important to us.”
The first 12 months were everything we could wish for: smooth operation, great feedback, strong enthusiasm within the industry. The feedback and customer engagement has been overwhelmingly positive.
Facilitating further market innovations
With Empire intentionally designed to facilitate further market innovation post-launch, its first 12 months have also seen the introduction two industry-first auction types that have revolutionised energy trading.
“April 2024 marked the launch of our first-in-market Buy Now auction, giving our customers the ability to trade closer to the delivery period, due to the increase in renewable energy availability.” Nils says.
Buy Now auctions are offered for every hour of the day, in both directions, providing there is sufficient Available Transfer Capacity (ATC). Auctions are aligned with BritNed’s Intraday allocation windows but begin prior to and continue after the respective Intraday auction. They are open 30 minutes ahead the standard Intraday auctions and continue to run – if the capacity is not purchased – until just five minutes before the Nomination Gate closure of that hour.
“Buy Now is the first auction of its kind and gives participants much greater flexibility, convenience, and control by facilitating trades much closer to the delivery period than has ever been possible previously on any UK Interconnector”, Nils explains.
“When the Buy Now offer is published, the price will automatically begin to decrease from the starting price in equal price steps every 15 seconds. The first participant that selects the purchase button on the Empire interface, or issues the respective API call, will acquire the offered capacity at its current price. The longer the auction continues without the capacity being purchased, the further the price will decrease.”
He adds: “What’s great is that Buy Now actually supported our Early Return to Service following our planned 6-week summer outage. We returned exactly one day and seven hours early (4pm CE(S)T on 10 August). As we had missed the timings to create Intraday auctions, we used Buy Now auctions to provide a much-needed service to the market as demand was high. We sold 3.2GW of capacity via Buy Now that day. This would simply not have been possible for our customers without Empire facilitating it and the capacity would have been lost to the market.”
Early 2025 will see Buy Now 2.0 launched, which will further improve the product and make it more flexible with enhanced usability, including the new GUI (Graphic User Interface) design and the current static 5MW blocks being replaced by a free entry of MW for customers.
In May 2024, Buy Now was swiftly followed by the launch of the Weekly auction, which saw BritNed become the first UK interconnector to introduce a permanent Weekly auction for traders.
“Again, Weekly auctions are facilitated by Empire and has proved extremely popular. We have high participation in Weekly auctions, which is so rewarding as it just shows we are developing and launching products that our customers – and the market – want and need.
“It was great to learn that most of the customers we surveyed following the trial of Weekly auction stated it is ‘very easy’ to use, and that some used it to better manage risk and exposure in their portfolio.”
Gold Energy Award: Innovation of the Year
And the crowning glory for Nils and his team as he reflects on one year of Empire?
“It has to be Empire being named ‘Innovation of the Year’ at the 2024 Industry Energy Eagle Awards.
“Recognition of the platform through exceptional customer satisfaction and positive feedback will remain our key driver, but the fact the judges commented on how Empire’s contribution has truly stood out in the industry was extremely rewarding to hear, and has spurred us on as the Empire roadmap continues to develop – so watch this space…
The fact the judges commented on how Empire’s contribution has truly stood out in the industry was extremely rewarding to hear, and has spurred us on as the Empire roadmap continues to develop.
