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...