From left to right: Irena Macheva, IT Service Manager; Kejsi Jonuzaj, Team Lead Data Science; Dr. -Ing. Ivan Dochev, Senior Data Scientist; Ventsislav Topuzov, CEO
A Decade of Transformation in Energy Trading and Market Dynamics
ROITI’s first-ever blog post was E-World 2015 – Lessons from Essen. It’s a fitting symbol that, 10 years after publishing that first post, we found ourselves exhibiting at E-World 2025 for the first time, reflecting on how much the industry has changed and how our insights have evolved.
The energy trading market has undergone a drastic transformation over the past decade, and it’s fascinating to see how many of the key themes discussed in 2015 remain relevant today—despite one key misinterpretation.
How Our 2015 E-World Recap Sounded
- Shift from Day-Ahead to Intraday Trading: All major traders, along with EPEX SPOT, highlighted the trend of shifting significant volumes from day-ahead to intraday trading. This has a great impact on trading operations and ETRM setup;
- Conventional Power Plants No Longer Price-Setters: The large volume of RES generation is increasing market dynamics, fundamentally changing the problems related to forecasting, unit commitment, and asset optimization in near real-time.
- Negative Prices: According to traders, the negative prices were not expected to continue in the future;
- Uncoupled Markets and Non-Synchronized Capacity Auctions: This remained a major challenge, with uncoupled markets and non-synchronized capacity auctions causing inefficiencies in the market.
How Our 2025 E-World Recap Sounds Today
- Intraday Trading is Pervasive: As many of us in professional services have known for the past few years, intraday trading is becoming increasingly pervasive. Algos are now a must for almost every major player, with some very successful companies that are not just algo-first, but algo-only.
- Renewable Energy (RES) Generation Dominates: RES generation has taken over, and the complexity of forecasting has shifted significantly towards understanding how the development of the energy mix will impact price movements. Price forecasting models are struggling to keep pace with this, and an increasing amount of the heavy lifting is shifting to short-term machine learning models.
- Negative Prices: This is one statement I wish I hadn’t made or interpreted 10 years ago
- Markets are Increasingly Coupled: The topic of uncoupled markets from 2015 has evolved into business as usual, with markets increasingly coupled, improving efficiency.
The Changing ETRM Ecosystem
What concerns ROITI the most is the ETRM ecosystem and the IT landscapes surrounding ETRMs, which have changed drastically. The landscape has evolved significantly, and now, our company’s CVs showcase projects with four players in the market, compared to just one a decade ago, which speaks for itself. In summary: interesting times 😊
Author: Ventsislav Topuzov
Editor: Hristina Tankovska
