case study

enspired and Priogen beat the clock with augmented trading

The customer

With the levelized cost of renewable power becoming increasingly competitive, the market has seen wind and solar generation making up an ever-increasing percentage of the available capacity. Intraday forecast updates lead to greater pricing volatility, which means more opportunities for traders. At the same time, the risks involved manifest themselves at all hours of the day, and the need to respond to these risks requires continuous evaluation of both weather and market fundamentals.

In short, due to increased market complexity, it’s not easy to be effective unless your trading relies on the latest and most advanced platform. For renewables, around-the-clock trading operations are not only desirable but can be even mandatory. However, implementing and improving a trading setup takes enormous effort and money. Developing an in-house algo-trading solution is a possibility, but in the months and years it takes to build and test, different trading setups have to be managed during the transition.

On the other hand, if an improved performance wants to be achieved with standard software, compromises may have to be made on features and flexibility. Priogen already implements a highly sophisticated and automated renewables forecasting platform; therefore, being on top of the volatility in expected generation was very straight forward. However, as most of its intraday traders moved on, the company’s ability to act on its propriety modelling was severely impacted.

The hiring process is notoriously slow and even more so for traders with the right skillset. Priogen found themselves up against the challenge of maintaining the effective balancing and trading of the assets under management with a significantly reduced ability to execute in the market. So, what is the most efficient approach to leverage an existing platform and the newest trade technology with a minimum time to market while keeping the budget under control?

It’s a continuous interaction between humans and machines where enspired’s trading experts deploy and implement self-learning algorithms in live trading with embedded monitoring and risk controls. The high-performance platform was trimmed to guarantee the fastest possible execution of trades – in a volatile market where algorithms compete for the best deals, speed is imperative. "The re-hiring and training of a whole new intraday desk can take months, and during that time, you still have the obligation to balance your energy and deliver positive trading results. The close collaboration with enspired enabled us to replicate the creation of a highly skilled intraday desk in the space of two weeks," Field adds. In addition to all benefits of trading as a service, the Priogen team did not need to give up transparency and control.

They can pre-optimize positions and enjoy full transparency of their trading activity, including strategy behaviour, order flow and real-time P&L – day or night. There is also close cooperation between Priogen and enspired trading experts: regular calls and workshops provide an excellent opportunity for in-depth discussions and knowledge exchange, and together, it is determined how to optimize positions further. Finally, the process to integrate the service and train the models was much faster than developing an in-house solution or customizing standard software would have been: It only took two weeks before Priogen was able to execute the first actual trades.