Article from "The Desk"
Friday, February 15, 2008 Volume 11

What’s better than having topshelf, real-time power flow data for US markets? Power flow data combined with market intel, that’s what. Such was the thinking when Louisville-based Genscape acquired power market intel services provider EnvaPower recently. As it happened, Genscape was already a long-time partner and data supplier to Enva and the new hookup is expected to expand both the depth and distribution of Enva subscription services. Currently Enva’s daily intel briefings cover MISO, NE, NY and PJM. Enva exec Hudson Gilmer says they will be rolling out CA market products soon, and an ERCOT report in Q3 or Q4. Genscape chief Sean O’Leary says Enva’s expanded access to Genscape flow data covering the US, Europe and elsewhere, is expected to speed up Enva’s expansion significantly.

While Genscape’s power flow monitoring services are well known to Desk readers, the Enva claim to fame may be less well known. We gotta tell ya though, we were impressed by what we saw and heard this week. Heard? You heard right. On top of the daily electronic reports you receive on price forecasts and other goings-on in the market, you get a call every morning from a live human analyst for a custom briefing on the market you hold dear. But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves.

Enva offers a standard package of power market intel stuff – PowerIQ – that includes demand forecasting, weather/forward pricing, a dynamic price simulator and so on. Gilmer says you buy an enterprise license to specific regions for the daily reports and associated alerts and briefings. You start the day around 7 a.m. with a recap report, basically looking at what happened and why the day before. Why were there spikes in the mid-afternoon, why the drop just before lunch? It looks at demand versus forecast, generation, actuals versus projections. Keep in mind this isn’t purely quant stuff, it’s human analysis with words and all. Gilmer says all the reports are purely “fundamentals based.”

“We have models that we’re truing up each morning. What were the actual power flows at the key interfaces, imports and exports, actual demand, prices? We recalibrate our models, and by the time it’s all done, we have a pretty high level of confidence we can explain what happened and further, model and explain day-of and next-day prices,” he says.

Next, around 9 a.m. you get a balance of day report – or “BAD” report in the local vernacular. This includes assumptions, market drivers, fuel prices, congestion, maintenance and so on.

Lastly, a little later on you receive the next-day report. “When that report goes out, we believe we’re giving you the most comprehensive view of what is likely to happen during the day: the drivers, the risks and so on. We’ll discuss specific generation units that we think will remain down, or won’t come up when planned, and the impact on price. Finally, our customers get a call from one of our analysts for a briefing one on one, right after the next-day report goes out,” he says.

We signed up for one of the briefings – it really was a human. My particular analyst – they have dozens – had been in the market for a number of years and managed to field every question I tossed his way regarding the PJM. He also had some additional insights about risks and so on. It took just a few minutes. Customers are also allowed to call during the course of the day, he said.

Gilmer says customers can run individual scenarios through the Enva power models as well: “What would it look like to have an additional 500 MW of demand at this particular point at this particular moment?” and so on.

The one downside to this array of services, if you can call it a downside, is that neither Genscape nor Enva have yet any sort of Web-based front end for users to bang away at the various services and data themselves. It’s all e-mail or telephone-based.

All this may change in the future, however. We asked O’Leary if a Web-based product is in the cards and he said, “It will come.” He says they’re now looking at how to modify the Genscape offering to be able to bring in new data sources.

Gilmer was a bit more hopeful and near-term on the Web concept. He says they developed something called “Power Console” for internal use. It manages about 10,000 sources of real-time data that they use to create the various daily reports. Power flows to prices to weather to river flows. Incidentally, they get weather data from WSI and DTN Weather. “This system is something we’ve always just used internally, but we’ve been thinking lately about possibly introducing it to customers. “ He says they are now jointly looking at this concept with Genscape. “Maybe it can be a value to both companies as a customer interface.” We’re sure that should be a very strong offering.

O’Leary says the Enva spread of services will at some point extend into the natural gas sector – this was big news to us. Recall that Genscape’s vast network of power flow monitoring devices around the country isn’t its only asset base. They also monitor real-time natural gas flows in pipelines. He says Enva will soon look to do the same thing in natural gas. O’Leary says the gas intel services will likely cover ERCOT and the Midwest.

Genscape also remains on the acquisition trail. He says in two or three years he wants the company to be the “leading supplier of fundamental energy information – what’s moving the market, what’s important to the market. You should be able to get it all at Genscape.”

O’Leary says EnvaPower will continue to operate as a stand-alone entity. The firm is currently hiring developers and market analysts.

For more information, contact Hudson Gilmer at