The energy sector in Europe is undergoing a dramatic transition towards the fully carbon neutral, sustainable energy system. The Nordic countries have set particularly stretching targets for this transition during this decade including introducing Energy Islands.

Nordic Regional Security Coordinator (RSC) is a key player in this transition as the provider of regional power system information and analysis to support the national Transmission System Operators (TSO) to ensure the efficient operation and high security of power supply at any time. Nordic RSC was established in 2017 as the Nordic Regional office situated in Copenhagen Towers, Ørestad and is still in a fast development and transition to operation. Nordic RSC is equally owned by Statnett, Svenska Kraftnät, Fingrid and Energinet and operates within the legislation and security regulations of each of the 4 countries. As a part of our further development Nordic RSC will be incorporated as an independent company during 2022.

Nordic RSC takes part of the European strategic development to Green Energy, led by the EU, via a number of initiatives like Clean Energy Package and the “Vision 2030” by the European Network of TSO’s that will innovate and develop the European electricity network further. Today there are 5 regional offices in Europe providing more and more supporting services to the energy market.  There is an exponential growth in the use of data to support the Green Energy transition which leads to highly data-driven needs including growing the interrelationship and collaboration across the regional organisations. The first initiatives are taken to expose some of the public data to relevant stakeholders in the market. Nordic RSC is heading at becoming a Nordic Competence Center sharing knowledge, data-insight and experience across peers and stakeholders in the Nordic market, says Director Jens Møller Birkebæk.

Robust platform and outsourcing strategy
To meet these challenges a robust IT organisational platform is necessary including an outsourcing strategy. Nordic RSC is now looking for the strategic IT partners to contribute realizing the strategy. Nordic RSC is publicizing an open EU tender to select the future IT Infrastructure partner and the related managed services with the view to enter a frame agreement. 
In future, Nordic RSC will therefore buy more standard IT services - from companies that specialize in precisely those areas and which have both extensive experience and the latest knowledge about technology, etc. It is e.g. Managed Services on data center services, cloud services, ServiceDesk, local area networks, employee PCs, mobile phones, general support, etc. 

"It may be possible to solve this kind of thing internally, but it requires a lot of resources. The technological development in the mentioned areas is going so fast that it requires a considerable effort to keep up. If we are to be up to date on all fronts, we risk becoming bottlenecks ourselves, because we cannot scale up or down quickly enough when new needs or opportunities arise", says IT Manager Bjarne Dahl.

New muscles for development 
While some tasks are outsourced to external partners, external partners in other areas are brought into the core of the IT department. The tenders must find the right suppliers for Nordic RSC to establish a strategic relationship for a number of years. 

"It is a huge task to get the green transition both safely and efficiently to the goal. For example, more than half of the electricity in 2020 came from wind and hydro, but already in 2030 - in just 11 years - the entire electricity system must be converted to renewable energy. It requires more innovation, more use of data and digitization that we very much can respond more quickly and adapt IT solutions to our professionals when new legislation, new market requirements, new pan-European rules or smarter ways of doing things emerge. That is why we need to get experts close by so that we can do things smartly and quickly", says Bjarne Dahl.