Energy Portfolios are Becoming More Complicated
The world is increasing its effort to reach net zero, and with the new momentum comes a growing reliance on renewable energy, presenting new challenges for energy traders. Renewables lend themselves to a wide range of asset types, meaning renewable-based asset portfolios are bigger, more diverse, and more difficult to manage. A single portfolio can include a vast mix of energy assets of all sizes and scale, ranging from solar farms, onshore and offshore wind, battery storage.
Because of their intermittent nature, renewables also contribute to increased volatility in energy markets. The combination of highly diverse portfolios and highly volatile markets means that making smart trading decisions will only get more difficult the further we are in the energy transition. But this doesn’t have to be a problem for traders — in fact, energy traders have a real opportunity to not only help drive the energy transition, but to also realize significant revenues.
Existing Solutions Fall Short
Historically, traders have used in-house solutions like Excel spreadsheets, ad hoc platforms, and manual workarounds to manage their trade loads. Solutions like these only serve a single asset type/function at a time, which means traders can find themselves managing multiple platforms at once.
In addition, these legacy solutions require manual integration with energy trading and risk management (ETRM) solutions and other software legacy systems — a process that is often clunky and expensive to maintain.
As a result, traders using these solutions aren’t equipped for the real-time asset management that’s needed to capitalize on volatile energy markets.
Kraken Has a Solution
Traders are in need of a solution that can optimize a range of assets — large scale solar, wind, and storage — in one place, providing a single source of truth that traders can use to make smarter trading decisions.
Kraken allows real-time control, optimization, and monitoring of any form of DER across a global portfolio of assets, providing insight into both financial and operational performance. With Kraken, traders can make real-time decisions about their asset portfolios using Kraken control, alert, optimize, and analyze functions.
Control
Kraken enables traders to remotely control and manage DERs in real time and at scale. This allows traders to resolve performance issues and deploy their assets more efficiently.
Optimize
Kraken has the ability to use a wide range of configurable inputs (e.g. price curves, demand, generation forecasts, DER constraints) to determine and execute economically optimized trading schedules. Considering all of a portfolio’s relevant parameters, the optimizer gives traders a single source of truth for all of their assets, allowing them to submit a single holistic view of their assets to their trading book.
Alert
Kraken allows traders to automate notifications for key triggers and events linked to physical and financial performance of DERs. Traders can see in real time whether assets are performing as needed, allowing them to react quickly to poor performance. This lowers the cost of operation and maintenance while improving financial performance.
Analyze
Kraken’s business intelligence layer provides the ability to analyze financial and operational performance across a portfolio. In addition, Kraken can use third-party data so traders can compare their performance to that of traders across the industry.
The Results
The Kraken solution enables traders to schedule trades, integrate with ETRM systems, and have visibility of any issues with asset performance, resulting in reduced cost and increased revenues for traders. But optimizing trades through Kraken will not only save traders time and earn them money, but will encourage the proliferation of renewable energy use and speed up the energy transition.
About Kraken
Kraken offers a best-in-class end-to-end platform for energy supply, and is operating in the UK, Japan, US, New Zealand, Australia and most of mainland Europe. Kraken’s proprietary platform is contracted to serve over 40 million energy accounts across the globe through licensees and its partnership with Octopus Energy, where it is responsible for the acquisition and management of 4.9 million retail customers and over 25,000 business customers (the largest of which is Arsenal FC).
Based on advanced data and machine learning capabilities, Kraken automates much of the energy supply chain to allow outstanding service and efficiency as the world transitions to a decentralized, decarbonized energy system.
Kraken is part of energy technology B-corp Octopus Energy Group, and was developed to enable third parties to take advantage of the technologies developed by Octopus Energy. It has already been licensed by major global players including Origin Energy, E.ON, Tokyo Gas and EDF.
After multiple deals with renewable energy organisations, the company remains on track to reach 100 million energy accounts by 2027.