Navitasoft’s website says that it provides energy business software solutions for the regulated electricity and gas market players such as transmission system operators, storage system operators, energy traders, shippers, and regulators. Located in Hungary, its solutions are applied by the most important players in the region in both segments: trading and system operation. Indeed, it offers an Operator’s suite and a Trader’s suite of solutions amongst others. It also has a new concept of its Trader suite and as I was told by Kornel Balogh this week, it is currently being onboarded at a customer with others likely to follow. But what is this new concept?
“ETRM is a big-ticket item,” he told me. ”For many, it is simply too expensive to buy and implement and as more market switch to 15- or even 5-minute increments, there are lots of small distributed assets being added to the grid. Classical ETRM is done yet any company that wants to trade must have an ETRM.” He also points to several other issues such as data volumes, complexity of that data, IT expert skills shortages all impacting specifically smaller and medium-sized traders. He suggests that all the smaller assets and the issues that they create, are not the realm of the classical ETRM. He may well be right. Navitasoft sees the emergence of the energy market of things that include assets connected to distribution grids like rooftop solar, for example. It sees an opportunity to roll up small-scale generation assets that would currently not sit well in a classical Virtual Power Plant. This is where the platform comes in, he told me, and Navitasoft wants to provide the software that enables the smaller assets and players via its Trader Suite. “The more agile version of the Trader suite can be used as VPP software and can also sit behind the meter and connect smaller assets to the wholesale energy market as well as to provide flexibility for grid operators,” he said.
A new website has been designed to explain this approach in more detail at Energy Market of Things. As that site states, “End-user devices have the potential to make an important contribution to the energy transition. The Energy Market of Things (EMoT) provides the platform to massively increase their participation in the market, boosting system flexibility while enabling trading companies, device owners and system operators to benefit.” And explains that its “platform connects device owners with aggregators and other trading companies – like an Airbnb of small-scale flexibility, we are not a trading entity or aggregator, but rather an intermediary.” With one customer being implemented and others in the pipeline, we will be following this initiative closely in the coming months to see how it goes. However, it is certainly an innovative approach that appears to be focused on enabling an energy transition.
