This years’ E-world energy & water at Messe Essen closed with a record number of participants, and among them was a part of ROITI’s team. Below are in short some of our thoughts and observations on the conference content and the exhibition we visited.

Power Trading in Europe

Contrary to the expectations, REMIT was not the main topic for the trading houses during the Power Trading conference. Instead, the focus was on the amazing market dynamics in the resent years.

All major traders, as well as EPEX SPOT, underlined the trend of shifting major volumes from Day Ahead to intraday trading. This is having a great impact on trading operations and ETRM setup;
Conventional power plants are not the price setting factor anymore. The large volume of RES generation is increasing the market dynimcs and this changes fundamentally the problems related forecasting, unit commitment and asset optimization in close to real times;
According to the traders, the negative prices are not expected to continue in the future;
Another major topic remains the un-coupled markets and non-synchronized capacity auctions.

Algorithmic trading – yes, HFT – not yet

One interesting topic from this year’s conference was the algorithmic trading. While the trading floors are still a bit shy from exploring real machine-to-machine trading (aka High Frequency Trading, HFT) there is some interest in the algorithmic trading. In this case the trader can develop and test its trading strategy in advance against set of criterias. Only the time ahead will show if the traditional power industry will adopt the financial industry hype around the HFT.

Photo: “E-world energy & water GmbH”, www.e-world-essen.com Rainer Schimm.

E-WORLD 2015: LESSONS FROM ESSEN