Energinet keeps the lights on with a digital platform built on Azure

Stable and sustainable 

Keeping the lights on in Denmark is a matter of balance. 

On one side of the equation is consumption: the people, buildings, vehicles, and more that require electricity and natural gas to live and operate. One the other side is production, with energy being generated by multiple sources. At the fulcrum, weighing both factors, is Energinet.

As the Danish state-owned energy company responsible for the secure, stable supply of electricity and natural gas across the entire country, Energinet has a deep commitment to Denmark and the people who depend on uninterrupted power service. At the core of its operations, Energinet needs data and analytics that accurately predict how much power is required by consumption and how much energy is available from production. It then activates market participants to regulate up or down so that both sides are in continuous harmony. 

On top of the challenging day-to-day operations, Energinet has ambitious long-term plans. In 2020, the Danish Council on Climate Change set a goal that by 2030, Denmark would achieve a 70 percent reduction in all domestic greenhouse gas emissions compared to emissions in 1990. As the transmission system operator of Denmark, Energinet plays a pivotal role in the nation’s sustainability performance. Accordingly, Energinet is focused on ensuring a 100 percent green power system by 2030.

Constantly seeking new ways to drive sustainability and incorporate renewable energy sources, Energinet wanted to support a grid that included more wind and solar power, but realized it needed a more accurate and flexible digital operating system to support this goal. 

Maintaining the balance of power, unleashing development for faster time to value

In early 2023, Energinet worked with the Microsoft team in Denmark to move off the legacy drift planning system (DPS) to a new digital operating system, digital drift planning (DDP), based on Microsoft Azure technology. 

“DPS was a bit like the game Mikado, or pick-up sticks,” says Morten Birkholm, Senior Manager of Digital Market Products at Energinet. “Everything was so interdependent. Making changes took a long time because of the uncertainty of how that change would affect other important projects.” The 10-year-old architecture had been developed by many different teams and vendors, and required very specialized training that could take over a year to impart to a new developer. This led to a technology stack that was built from a blend of solutions: some that were industry standards, some specific to the Nordic/European region, and others developed specifically for Energinet, with limited interoperability between each of them.

Now with DDP, based on Azure cloud technology, Energinet has achieved a full-scale modernization that also enables it to immediately respond to market demands and deploy new solutions. “DPS was a monolith,” says Rasmus Hartvigsen, Domain Architect with Energinet. “By chopping it up and building microservices and domain services, it enabled us to actually scale.” 

Development and deployment of DPS had required developers with typically a year of experience, but Energinet’s use of Azure DevOps pipelines and code repositories created measurable improvements. “While updates on the legacy system were released every second week, with Azure DevOps, we have 11 teams deploying independently up to 200 times every week into a supply critical solution,” explains Birkholm. “We have seen teams deploying their first feature with only a few months of experience, due to the high level of automated testing. That’s a major achievement.” 

Using Azure Functions as the company’s main compute container, Energinet can accumulate and process bids at four times the resolution that was possible before. This additional compute power will be essential as more wind and solar energy sources are added to the Danish power grid.

Automating complex tasks while maintaining oversight

With the power of Microsoft Azure, Energinet is able to supercharge its development cycles while standardizing and better automating the energy balancing process.

“Back in 2000, our system was almost like a car with manual transmission: the operator had to do everything themselves,” explains Birkholm. “Gradually, that became more like automatic transmission with cruise control—basically, more proactive balancing, but we still had to manage activation manually. Now we’re at a place where DDP is capable of automating activation and doing cost-efficient balancing with a 15-minute resolution, down from an hour with DPS.” Moving forward, Energinet’s vision for DDP is to maintain a level of operator control and oversight while being highly automated and efficient. “We believe this is a key capability to operate a power system which is becoming 100 percent renewable within the next decade,” Birkholm adds. 

Data integrity is also crucial. Energinet needs to rapidly log energy bids as they come in with Azure Application Insights and store them immutably in Azure Storage. “We also run on a pooled SQL Server,” Hartvigsen says. “Because our data load is not huge, the pool server is a great cost saver for us.” 

Better partners, better power, better future

Energinet trusted Microsoft for its technical expertise and objective view on the company’s organizational challenges. 

“Microsoft was able to hold up the mirror for us,” says Birkholm. “They asked the questions that may hurt but are important for our organization’s development.” Hartvigsen adds, “With Microsoft, we have a trustworthy advisor and we also have all of the tools in Azure that we are using today and that we will be able to use tomorrow.”

Together, Energinet and Microsoft have made it possible for Denmark’s evolving digital transformation to remain agile and open to change, as market parameters and renewable energy opportunities continue to evolve.

Learn more about Energinet on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.