EUROPEAN HARMONIZED DATA AND MESSAGE EXCHANGE FOR CORRECT METERING AND FOR CUSTOMER CHOICE: A PREREQUISITE FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE INTERNAL ENERGY MARKET

摘要

In the past few years the local markets of the various European countries have become national markets, which in turn are being integrated into regional markets and finally a single European market. The liberalisation of the energy markets of the different countries enables customers to switch from one energy supplier to another. Since July 1, 2007, and in many countries already before, this is common practice nationally. To ensure that international supplier switches and relocations can be handled efficiently and correctly by the relevant automated systems, message exchange between the different parties in the European energy market must be more and more standardised. These automated electronic systems are necessary for two reasons: To save costs, and to make the handling of millions of household or small commercial customer transactions possible at all. To make an integrated European market feasible, validated metered data must also be uniformly and correctly interpreted. This also requires standardisation and harmonisation. This paper describes the approach towards this harmonisation of nine of the European countries with the longest history of household customer choice in electricity markets, i.e. towards efficient and practical business processes related to customers changing their energy suppliers. Associations and companies from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and also Austria and Finland formed the European forum for energy Business Information eXchange (ebIX) to jointly push harmonised process and data descriptions forward. Recently, Croatia, Estonia and France have participated in parts of the ebIX work. The paper uses examples from the customer switching and the exchange of metered data processes to describe the complexity, difficulties and successes of harmonising such process descriptions internationally. The examples show how the harmonised descriptions need to be very detailed in order to be useful to the IT industry for efficient software development. They need to include use cases, code lists, domain models, role models, sequence diagrams, activity diagrams, class diagrams, core components and data exchange formats. Both EDIFACT and XML implementations are supported.