Transaction Management for Wholesale Energy Markets
Market Operations Solutions
- nMarket Power
- nMarket Gas
- nMarket OfferManager
- nMarket AllocationManager
- Market Operations for Ireland
- Data Analysis Tool
Transaction Management for Complex Physical and Financial Wholesale Energy Markets
nMarket Power
nMarket Power for wholesale energy transaction management offers an integrated, bid-to-bill solution for straight-through processing accuracy, efficiency and performance. It is easily configured out of the box and is specifically designed to support the requirements of each regional energy market while maintaining a consistent user interface.
It is the only solution that offers true multi-market coverage across every operational North American power market. Based on current clients and market volume, it provides functionality for the scheduling, bidding and settlement of more generation and load than all of the other competing software solutions combined.
nMarket Power is currently deployed in the following North American
ISO/RTO markets:
- California
- Midwest
- New England
- New York
- Ontario
- PJM
- SPP
- ERCOT
Key Features of nMarket Power
- Flexibility to evolve as the markets evolve
- Multiple-market coverage
- Bid-to-bill process management
- Multiple technical configurations
- Standardized interfaces for integration with other systems
- Front- to mid- to back-office productivity enhancement
Complete Nomination-to-Bill Transaction Management with "Out-of-the-Box" Pipeline Configuration
nMarket Gas
Gas marketers need new tools to provide efficient communications with the hundreds of North American pipelines and to be able to anticipate and validate the expenses incurred on those pipelines. nMarket Gas supports the shadowing of pipeline invoices - something that gas marketers have not focused on in the past due to the lack of available software tools. nMarket Gas automates this process, and the demands of supporting volume management and counter-party settlement.
Key Features of nMarket Gas
- "Out-of-the-Box" Pipeline Configuration - integration for nominations, scheduled quantities, allocation/balancing statements and invoices and complies with specific pipeline transaction requirements
- We Pretest Every Transaction Set - Ventyx pretests NAESB transactions sets and proprietary transactions in real-world environments for all supported pipelines. As a result, you only have to test connectivity rather than the transactions themselves.
- Multiple Pipelines - nMarket Gas allows you to standardize on a single transaction management solution across multiple pipelines.
- Comprehensive Transaction Management Capabilities - nMarket modules provide the electronic capabilities for gas marketers to connect with interstate and intrastate pipelines to communicate nomination, scheduling and invoicing transactions. They include the tools to manage transactions, communicate with pipelines and calculate shadow settlements, whether you nominate with the pipeline through EDI, spreadsheet, by fax, email or via electronic bulletin boards.
Generation Offer Management for ISO/RTO Markets
nMarket Offer Manager
You Define the Strategies... OfferManager Creates the Offers
OfferManager allows you to automatically create generation offers according to pre-defined strategies, pre-validate the offers against ISO and user-defined rules, and provides the asset manager with decision support capabilities to determine the optimal offer strategy. This allows asset managers to spend less time on logistics and manual processes and more time executing their strategy.
Market Specific - Easily Integrated
Like all nMarket Suite modules, OfferManager addresses the specific requirements of each ISO/RTO market in a consistent and powerful solution to optimize the offer management process. OfferManager is easily integrated with upstream generation management, fuel planning, optimization, and deal capture systems utilizing standard, XML-based interfaces.
OfferManager Key Features:
- Includes standard methods to create cost and market based offers
- Provides the capability to plug-in custom methods for offer creation
- Pre-validates offers against ISO and business rules prior to submission to ISO
- Supports the ability to manage each configuration of a combined-cycle plant
- Maintains and submits outages to the ISO/RTO
- Provides quick-edit capabilities to allow users to adjust offers graphically or via percent or absolute value adjustment
- Provides detailed audit trail that captures offer input data used to create offers as well as each version of an offer
- Allows each user to subscribe to notifications when data inputs change for a particular unit (ex. fuel price or operating limits)
- Provides customizable screen layouts and window attributes for each user
- Creates similar day LMP forecasts
- Provides up to date graphical decision support capabilities for key market and offer analysis information
- Tracks emissions credits and usage
- Tracks fuel prices inventory and usage
- Calculates profit and loss by generation asset and by portfolio
- Submits energy and ancillary services offers to the ISO
- Supports programmatic inbound APIs for key inputs
Allocate nMarket Shadow Settlement Estimates and Wholesale Settlements with a Market Operator to the Individual Customer or Business Unit of a Market Participant
nMarket AllocationManager
Many of today's market participants provide a variety of services to both external and internal business entities. These services for retail and industrial load customers include scheduling, resource management, trade book management and managing internal business processes. nMarket AllocationManager allows market participants to define sub-participants (customers, business units, trade books, etc.) and accurately allocate and invoice market-level charges and credits to each via standard or custom allocation methodologies.
AllocationManager Key Features
- Allows market participants to create an invoice for any time period based on the best set of data available (either settlement statements or shadow settlement estimates). Furthermore, AllocationManager manages changes of underlying data over time to calculate accruals and prior period adjustments.
- Allows market participants to calculate the data required to calculate a per-kWh rate and pass the data to a retail billing engine via a standard outbound API.
- Allocations can be calculated for a market operator settlement statement or nMarket shadow settlements.
- Ability to manage allocation methodology rules by charge type and date range.
- Ability to view customer-level data used for allocation.
- Allocation results can be viewed at a summary or detail level.
- Simple invoicing generation and tracking functionality is included.
- A set of standard allocation methodologies are provided per market.
Operations Management Supporting Complex Scheduling, Billing, and Settlement Functions
Market Operations for Ireland
Market Operations for Ireland integrates with other business applications to streamline time-critical information exchange among traders, schedulers, and energy accounting personnel. It is used by wholesale electricity market participants, generation owners/operators, marketers, and utilities seeking efficient, reliable, and auditable management of complex operations processes. Market Operations for Ireland provides numerous important benefits including:
- Consistent decision making through reduced spreadsheet dependency
- Production-grade enterprise data management for multi-market, multi-commodity operations
- Increased ability to detect and act on errors in market settlement invoices
- An auditable, repeatable secure process for settlement information
- Flexible user interface that can be tailored to specific business process needs
- Data integration between internal departments and external, third-party software solutions, such as accounting/general ledger, CIS/CRM, meter data, ETRM, and market information systems
Key Features of Market Operations for Ireland
- Market Operator Communications – Automated communications with wholesale market operators and transmission operators, including message status tracking and detailed audit trail for all data transactions. Multiple markets and interfaces can be managed through a single integrated user interface. Maintenance service includes updates for protocol compliance.
- Market Operations for Ireland - Bid/Offer Submission - User-defined templates and data-entry aids for creating and modifying bids, offers, and schedules. Users can create and save bid/offer scenarios for multiple resources, as well as import bid/offer data from Resource Optimization models. It also provides a complete audit trail for tracking edits, approvals, and market actions.
- Position Reporting - Captures market prices and dispatch results for up-to-date position analysis at the resource, delivery point, zone, and portfolio level. It also includes a graphical load/supply balancing tool to facilitate scheduling within contract limits.
- Shadow Settlement and Dispute Resolution - Automatically downloads and validates settlement statements and invoices. It supports multi-state settlement and invoice calculations. A comprehensive set of user views supports filtering for significant variances and drill-down views for detailed analysis of variances. All data is organized in a secure database supporting back-office reporting, audit, and dispute resolution processes.
- Generation Scheduling and Settlement Features - For generation operators/owners, It provides a central repository for managing resource plan data submitted to market operators. Automated data exchange with plant historians, control systems, and meter data collection systems is supported. In addition, Market Operations for Ireland includes a detailed representation of production cost parameters, operating limits, and modes, including weather-adjusted heat rate curves for various CCGT configurations and operating modes.
- Comprehensive Contract Billing - Produce complex invoices for counterparties or "behind-the-fence" customers associated with Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), Joint Operating Agreements (JOAs), Energy Service Agreements (ESAs), and other complex contracts. A comprehensive set of contract rate structures supporting multiple commodities is also included, encompassing energy, demand, transmission, ancillary services, process steam, fuel, O&M charges, emissions, and taxes. Complex formula-based rates can be entered online by authorized users. Billing can be exported directly to an accounts receivable/payable or general ledger system.
Extracting Data from nMarket and Other Applications for Data Analysis and Basic Reporting
Data Analysis Tool
The Data Analysis Tool for reporting enables you to collect high-volume, complex custom reports extracted from existing information (e.g., settlements, deals, accounting) adding greater business functionality with this reporting capability.
