Catching Up With Powel’s New GM

On August 17th of this year, Powel announced that it had appointed Dr. Josef Janssen as General Manager for its Swiss office. Following on from the acquisition of Delta Energy Solutions, Powel has continued to focus on the broader European markets for its range of software products and Dr. Janssen will now spearhead these efforts. We were recently introduced to Dr. Janssen and had the opportunity to pose a number of questions relating to Powel and its ambitions.

Previously Dr. Janssen had been the Head of Trading & Origination at BKW Energie AG, where he led the trading department consisting of traders, analysts and schedulers. There he was responsible for term-, spot- and intraday trading, origination and marketing of reserve energy, in addition to market analysis and scheduling/nomination of various energy programs. Commodities trading included CO₂, power, gas, oil, coal and renewable energy certificates. He is also a Ph.D. Economist by background.

After 10-years in trading, Dr. Janssen wanted to see the industry from another point of view and the role at Powel presented such an opportunity from the angle of a solutions supplier and IT. He told us that he expects to capitalize on his expertise in European energy markets to help Powel not just increase its presence in the broader European markets, but also continue the company’s history of product and solution innovation. For him, Powel is a good choice as “it is not so big that he cannot have an impact nor so small that it has difficulties delivering on its promise.”

His mandate includes not only the DeltaXE scheduling & logistics solution but the entire range of Powel Smart Energy solutions as well as Smart Grid and Smart Metering solutions that help make informed decisions and optimize production assets based on available resources. On DeltaXE, he described it as being a unique solution in that it covers most European power and gas markets and it is easy to deliver add on functionality to the product as well. He described user feedback as very positive in terms of the usability and performance of the tool; something that he sees as vitally important as European trading interest move closer to delivery. In short-term and intra-day markets, speed and reliability are critically important.

He also hopes to capitalize on Powel’s Nordic experience in thermal and renewable energy portfolio optimization around power production and balancing renewables, for example. With the changes taking place in European power markets, he sees an opportunity to market and deliver a product that he also sees as being extremely usable with good performance. Finally, he hopes to architect new solutions to new problems that are emerging in European markets as a result of all of the changes taking place there. In particular, power producers face significant challenges with low and decreasing prices and need to find ways to increase income from these assets in areas like trading and optimization while reducing costs via business process optimization.

Although he has only been onboard for a matter of a few weeks, he likes what he sees in Powel and has two key strategies to deliver on. The first is to help expand Powel’s business across Europe and increase its footprint. Already, Powel has had success with customers like AET, Statkraft Markets, Axpo and in Italy where Repower is implementing the Powel DeltaXE software to support the business desk in Milan, handling the Italian gas processes. The standard solution will support the national and regional network nominations together with the REMI points, transportation and capacity booking processes, PSV hub nomination, storage handling, allocation and balance data handling, and GME offer and bidding. The second objective is to push forward innovation in areas like Intraday trading and AutoTrading that support new market opportunities and business models.

We wish Dr. Janssen well in his new role.

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