Drax Group Deploys Solace to Power Up the UK's Electric Vehicle Drive

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LONDON, Feb. 23, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Solace, the leading enabler of event-driven architecture (EDA) for real-time enterprises, announced today renewable energy company Drax Group has deployed Solace event streaming and management technology to underpin its industry-leading Electric Vehicle (EV) solutions, powered by renewable energy. With 400,000 EVs in the UK, this will affect a large proportion of EV drivers and help the UK reach its goal of becoming net-zero by 2050.

Supply chain disruptions are bringing to the fore the importance of balancing power, demand and supply, especially in the wake of wild energy price fluctuations. To maximize energy efficiency, providers and consumers both demand real-time updates of commodity prices, which ultimately influence purchasing decisions.

Event-driven architecture is the basis of Ofgem's mandate to enable half-hour energy settlements for businesses and consumers (MHHS), and Elexon, who set the Balancing and Settlement Code (BSC) in Great Britain. To generate and deliver renewable power in the most efficient way and remain compliant with the programme, energy providers need real-time, event-driven data. Drax has chosen Solace, as the market-leading enabler of EDA in the UK energy sector, to orchestrate real-time information sharing with the MHHS Data Integration Platform.

This means the use of EDA will benefit EV users and producers by effectively turning electric vehicles into de facto storage batteries, ready to be used at home in lieu of peak energy price consumption levels, or even sold back to the grid.

Solace PubSub+ Platform is the first purpose-built EDA platform available today that can support the real-time movement of data between vehicles, charging points, energy sources and energy suppliers. The interoperability of the platform allows multiple technologies and systems to access data in real time, empowering users to make energy usage more efficient and agile.

"Getting more electric vehicles on the road is key to decarbonising the UK. At Drax, our EV experts can help fleet managers by doing the hard work for them when it comes to looking at the data to understand which EV solutions would benefit their business," said Adam Hall, Energy Services Director, Drax. "Event-driven architecture is the key to making energy production and consumption resource-effective and therefore limit waste and make life easier for UK homes and businesses.''

The real-time nature of EDA allows for the most cost-effective energy source to be consumed at a specific point in time, which will, in turn, encourage new and disruptive services.

"The efforts to make the energy supply chain more efficient are commendable, not only for the environmental benefits but for the energy savings they bring to consumers and producers alike," said David Mitchell, Regional VP, United Kingdom & Ireland, Solace. "The UK in particular is leading the effort to ensure energy efficiency, as the Ofgem's MHHS programme confirms. Drax again proves itself to be a trusted provider with this initiative, as it will allow EV owners to make the best use of electricity."

Case in point - Drax's first EV customer, SES Water, made an initial investment in 16 new charging points and replaced 10 of its 120 strong fleet of diesel vans with electric vehicles. This small step is saving SES Water an estimated 43 tonnes of CO2 per year.

About Drax
Drax Group's purpose is to enable a zero carbon, lower cost energy future and in 2019 announced a world-leading ambition to be carbon negative by 2030, using bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technology. Drax's around 3,000 employees operate across three principal areas of activity – electricity generation, electricity sales to business customers and compressed wood pellet production and supply to third parties. For more information visit www.drax.com

Power generation: 
Drax owns and operates a portfolio of renewable electricity generation assets in England and Scotland. The assets include the UK's largest power station, based at Selby, North Yorkshire, which supplies five percent of the country's electricity needs. Having converted Drax Power Station to use sustainable biomass instead of coal it has become the UK's biggest renewable power generator and the largest decarbonisation project in Europe. It is also where Drax is piloting the groundbreaking negative emissions technology BECCS within its CCUS (Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage) Incubation Area. Its pumped storage, hydro and energy from waste assets in Scotland include Cruachan Power Station – a flexible pumped storage facility within the hollowed-out mountain Ben Cruachan. The Group also aims to build on its BECCS innovation at Drax Power Station with a target to deliver 4 million tonnes of negative CO2 emissions each year from new-build BECCS outside of the UK by 2030 and is currently developing models for North American and European markets.

Pellet production and supply:
The Group has 19 operational pellet plants and developments with nameplate production capacity of around 5 million tonnes a year. Drax is targeting 8 million tonnes of production capacity by 2030, which will require the development of over 3 million tonnes of new biomass pellet production capacity. The pellets are produced using materials sourced from sustainably managed working forests and are supplied to third party customers in Europe and Asia for the generation of renewable power. Drax's pellet plants supply biomass used at its own power station in North Yorkshire, England to generate flexible, renewable power for the UK's homes and businesses, and also to customers in Europe and Asia.

Customers:
Drax supplies renewable electricity to UK businesses, offering a range of energy-related services including energy optimisation, as well as electric vehicle strategy and management. Learn more at www.energy.drax.com

About Solace
Solace helps large enterprises become modern and real-time by giving them everything they need to make their business operations and customer interactions event-driven. With PubSub+, the market's first and only event management platform, the company provides a comprehensive way to create, document, discover and stream events from where they are produced to where they need to be consumed – securely, reliably, quickly, and guaranteed. Behind Solace technology is the world's leading group of data movement experts, with over 20 years of experience helping global enterprises solve some of the most demanding challenges in a variety of industries – from capital markets, retail, and gaming to space, aviation, and automotive. Established enterprises such as SAP, Barclays and NASA, multinational automobile manufacturers such as Daimler, Groupe Renault and Groupe PSA, and industry disruptors such as the Singapore Land Transport Authority use Solace's advanced event broker technologies to modernise legacy applications, deploy modern microservices, and build an event mesh to support their hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and IoT architectures. Learn more at solace.com.

Solace Press Contact
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Inés Mitsou
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