Business Plan 2025
A message from Steve Brittan CEO, Xoserve
“This plan has been developed against a background of increasing change in energy markets. Perhaps of most significance is the new Government coming to power. But I would also note that the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) is also about to “go live” Although as yet we haven’t seen direct impact on the markets in which Xoserve operates, we anticipate that we will be called upon to support a range of policy interventions, and the acceleration in decarbonisation of energy supplies. We embrace this change and are keen to play our part in support of the Government’s objectives and collaborate with NESO.
The regulator has already consulted on changes to Code governance, and again this is an area where Xoserve is keen to contribute fresh thinking – our White Paper on Gas Code Management is to be published alongside BP25 in November and we hope that the Regulator and industry partners will find this helpful as the Regulator moves forward to implement new Code Management arrangements. Another significant new initiative is Project Trident. This will see the migration of the UK Link system from its current SAP platform, which is soon to go ‘out of support’ by SAP. We are advocating an earlier start to this project than had previously been considered, as recent Proof of Concept work showed us that migrating the existing system would be more complicated and take longer than had been anticipated.
The earlier start of Project Trident is designed to reduce risk to migration, allowing greater time for testing of the new system whilst the existing UK Link system remains in service. This will be a major project, spanning several years in the ‘build’ phase, with a target for the new system to be operating through to at least 2040. NESO’s recently published future energy scenarios demonstrated that in all cases considered, a system like UK Link will be needed. BP25 is accompanied by the Project Trident Strategic Outline Case (SOC), which has been developed using the Treasury ‘Green Book approach’. As we consider options for the project, we will then develop the Outline Business Case (OBC), and finally a Full Business Case (FBC). Necessarily, at this early stage of Trident, we have only very approximate initial costings, which the OBC and FBC will quantify more accurately.”
Business Plan