Energy trading application

Trading in electric energy can be harnessed to great benefits for producers, traders and other market participants. Due to demand/supply variations depending on a number of factors (plant failure, weather conditions etc), a producer who can adapt quicker than others can reap huge rewards.

Consider this fact - during the highest peak demand hour in 2009 in south texas, trading rates for a unit of electricity was approx 75 times the normal rate. A producer who could tune its supply/demand for this scenario will be able to highly profit.

Relevant data comes from different sources -

Demand - comes from internal plans (based on projection, weather forecast and so on) and can change as frequently as every 15 minutes. It also comes from Grid regulatory authority which is also periodically broadcasted. There can be other internal or external forecasts which can be taken into account.

Supply - realtime supply data comes from control systems. In addition, supply plan will take into account generation capability including demand response generation, and existing rates.

A participant which gets all this data faster than other participants will be in a better position (look for some similarity with HFT on stock exchanges).

...to be continued...

Energy data management in SAP

With environmental regulation and mechanisms like cap-and-trade coming up, every organization will need to collect its energy and emission data in detailed form; and make it available for analysis / decision-making.

For example, additional KPIs like carbon footprint for products may be extremely important for businesses (think of information saying this TShirt or this pack of Orange Juice contributed 23 Units of CO2 emissions - on the label).

Most of emission data can be collected from existing information in multiple systems. Taking a case of a manufactured product, it can be determined how much emission happened per product (add the emission from energy used in producing, energy used in facility/maintenance, energy/fuel used in warehousing/shipping - and convert to dollar value by using the carbon trading rates).

For a somewhat related example check the information at site www.sapsustainabilityreport.com

This is a BI type application which can collect information from production, logistics, plant maintenance, warehousing and transportation modules and calculate carbon footprints in dollar terms for products, employees, locations and so on.

Smart phone game Antyakshari

Idea is to have people play antyakshari on their smart phones. Basic idea is simple -

- A user can play antyakshari either with another person, a random user (akin to chat), or with the computer itself.

- By typing a few words, game will scroll the matching songs that the user can select; the other participant then gets to

- hear the actual song stanza played by the server

or

- In a private mode, the person can sing and send his/her own voice to the other participant (likely to be used between friends used to playing it)

Gamers can have a history of scores. Game can have level of difficulty as well as themes (for example oldies, or remixes, or Jagjit Singh....). There can be options of staged contests for higher scorers (and prizes to be won).

Gamers can play it on smartphones (something like flash app) or over the web.