Power markets have always been a complex proposition, perhaps especially so in the places where they could do the most good. How to price the creation and delivery of a commodity that can’t be stored, is technologically complex to ship and often dirty to create where it isn’t unreliable?

Transmission is the central component of the traditional power market. The lines and towers are the only thing that can make power flow from lower priced areas to higher priced areas, and as part of managing access the administrators of these markets have begun to charge for Congestion Revenue Rights. In California, those CRRs have become a major market, with banks, trading houses and power marketing firms all getting in on the action since trading began in 2009.

With so much at stake, building data sets of sufficient strength and flexibility to be able to more efficiently trade and manage the market has become a top priority for California’s energy market. Henry Shin of California’s Power Market Consulting, Inc. says his firm, which hosts open access same time information system data for the California ISO, has the inside edge on tools companies can use to understand not only CRR data but eventually all kinds of power market challenges.

To find out more about OASIS data, click here.

Power Market Consulting uses Quantrix technology to model congestion revenue rights transactions. Shin says that once the technology, which allows him to query the data and to share it securely when he wants to, is shown to clients they generally want to extend it to other areas of the enterprise.

“To address the volatility in congestion cost, CAISO has developed a financial instrument, Congestion Revenue Rights (CRRs), to help market participants hedge their Day Ahead (DA) market congestion cost by either allocating or auctioning off financial rights to transmission paths. The CAISO’s CRR market has been active for almost four years with over 3 million GWhs of CRR transactions by nearly 100 market participants that include load serving entities, generators, and energy traders,” a company representative wrote in an email.

“Interaction with the system can be customized to some degree,” Shin said. “Its a very powerful modeling platform – much bigger than the individual report.”

“Managing power transactions often requires several disparate systems and generates very large volumes of data,” says David Phillips, Marketing Director, Quantrix. “OASISLive is a great example of how using a powerful modeling platform that supports complex business analytics can help organizations maximize value from their data.”

The ability to build, maintain and then analyze databases and real-time information updates is a fundamental part of the Big Data promise that has underlined the benefits of the much-promoted smart grid concept. To read much more about smart grid on Breaking Energy, click here.