When looking back at the history of ETRM systems since the inception of power markets, we can see two different paths that vendor companies have pursued. One path involved building new trading applications on the top of other software solutions used by energy companies while the other entailed constructing new trading software from scratch. The first group of vendors has often already developed tools like consumption forecasting, power plant unit commitment, and dispatch, typically based on a general time series data structure. These vendors often continued to utilize the same time series structure for trading data, such as price or volume curves. However, the second group of vendors, who started from scratch, often involved traders in architecting the system. As a result, their software was crafted by traders and for traders making it preferable for trading houses. In contrast, the first group of solutions was primarily adopted by small and medium utilities requiring a set of functionalities from production optimization and forecasting to basic portfolio management. In the past ComTech and its precursor, CommodityPoint, talked about asset-heavy and asset-lite ETRM to describe these two approaches. Today, all these ETRM solutions are considered as legacy systems. Why should we then discuss… continue reading