Drax Group deploys Solace to improve its IT infrastructure

LONDON, April 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Solace announced today that Drax Group has selected its event streaming and management technology to make its IT architecture more efficient, agile, and to help reduce the cost of delivery.

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.   

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 nearly 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 the Royal Bank of Canada, multinational automobile manufacturers such as Groupe Renault and Groupe PSA, and industry disruptors such as Jio use Solace's advanced event broker technologies to modernize 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.

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. Its 2,900 employees operate across three principal areas of activity – electricity generation, electricity sales to business customers and compressed wood pellet production.

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 two thirds of 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. 

Customers:  
Through its two B2B energy supply brands, Haven Power and Opus Energy, Drax supplies energy to 250,000 businesses across Britain.

Pellet production:
Drax owns and operates three pellet mills in the US South which manufacture compressed wood pellets (biomass) produced from sustainably managed working forests. These pellet mills supply around 20% of the biomass used by Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire to generate flexible, renewable power for the UK's homes and businesses.

For more information visit www.drax.com

Press Contacts for Solace:
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SOURCE Solace Corporation