Conversation with Lee Priest, Leading Brady’s Scheduling Product Direction
Lee Priest is the product manager for Brady’s PowerDesk Scheduler and PowerDesk Balancer products. His role is to make sure that Brady is building the right functionality and to solve any issues that users might have, he told me, and he appears to relish it. With a strong background in power and gas operations and dispatch, he has been in the Brady role for the last 18-months or so. What he sees as different about the Brady solutions to competing products is market coverage, he told me. “PowerDesk Scheduler and Balancer solutions support scheduling power trades and cross-border flows across 30+ markets in Europe.”
The PowerDesk Scheduler solution creates TSO-specific formats across Europe for trades and cross-border flows and allows users to schedule movements with the TSO and see whether they are accepted via two-way communication with TSO. Any issues with schedules can be viewed and fixed by the user. The PowerDesk Balancer product sits on top of this solution for some customers providing real-time visualisation of market balances comprising trades, forecasts, and flows. “Users can see capacities, balances in various markets so as to plan their flows and then schedule them,” he said.
“I believe that Brady is well suited to companies with extensive trading operations across Europe,” he said. This is due to the solutions’ ability to customise and deal with multiple market complexities. However, he also sees larger commodity traders and banks as prospective users of Brady’s software while pointing to Brady’s strong Irish footprint as another differentiator.
Lee also pointed out that Brady has a robust footprint in the Irish energy market with its software offerings. ‘Brady supplies a customised solution for the Irish Grid, where users can quickly access new instruments and markets,’ he says.
“The fundamental problem solved by the software is communication with all of the different European markets,” he said. “Although there are standards, there is little enforcement of that and the challenge remains staying abreast with changes – like that on the Czech OTE, which is changing to 15-minute resolution.” He notes that keeping up with market change is challenging, and yet with very close collaboration with its customers and with markets, Brady can keep everything up to date. “We recently added connectivity to the new Britned nominations platform for interconnector trading between Great Britain and the Netherlands,” he added.
Indeed, the product roadmap that is his responsibility includes items like AS4 communication protocol for Germany, the Czech market changes and readying for pan-European EPEX auctions later this year, among other items. Lee is excited about other cross product collaboration projects under way within the wider PowerDesk suite.
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