The Datapred blog

There was a time when energy buyers often reacted to the description of Datapred's buying and hedging optimization capabilities with an offended comment: "we are not speculators!"

In response to growing energy price instability, numerous industrial companies in Europe have begun exploring the possibilities of energy hedging. But hedging is a risk management technique... that carries its own risks, and quantifying the potential downside of hedging strategies is crucial.

For energy-intensive companies, understanding and anticipating natural gas price fluctuations is critical. And natural gas storage levels always feature prominently in qualitative comments on European gas markets. It makes sense: low gas inventories should herald price tensions, while high gas inventories should create slack in the gas market. But can quantitative analysis confirm that intuitive relationship?

Faced with intense price pressure, an energy-intensive company recently used Datapred to test gas hedging strategies, as part of a larger cost reduction initiative. Here is a summary of the significant cost and risk optimization potential the company uncovered.

Energy buyers can now seamlessly integrate PPAs into their situation reports and simulations.

Industrial energy buyers have traditionally focused on end-of-year negotiations with utilities. But there is growing pressure from boards of directors for these buyers to be more flexible and reactive in their approach. Should buyers comply, and if so, how often should they reassess their buying or hedging strategy?

The ground-breaking AI will help energy buyers with reporting, market analysis and decision making.

Most industrial energy buyers we talk to still use Excel for record-keeping and reporting. But with prices now fluctuating significantly and transactions becoming more complex, maintaining spreadsheets full of data is turning costly and error-prone, causing more stress for buyers and losing money for their businesses. So it seems that energy procurement, like other corporate functions long before, has finally reached the limits of Excel for reporting. We see 5 limitations that energy buyers should be aware of.

The new module will complement the existing Markets (market analyses) and Decisions (decision support) modules of the software.

Our solution for energy and raw material buyers can identify and quantify the drivers of energy and raw material prices. Following a client suggestion, we have recently tested whether Chinese economic activity had a measurable impact on European gas prices - the rationale being that at 10% of worldwide gas consumption, China has enough market power to move international gas prices.