A Vietnamese employee of GE’s newly built turbine generator factory walks in front of wind turbine components inside an assembly line in the northern coastal city of Hai Phong on October 15, 2010.
GE last month celebrated its 20,000th wind turbine installation, a gargantuan achievement given the US power generation giant only stepped into the sector in 2002 when it purchased the wind power assets from recently bankrupted Enron. Keep reading →
Financial innovation and energy trading have regularly gone hand-in-hand, as utilities and other firms constantly seek to hedge their exposure to price volatility or take bets on the perennially volatile energy business.
Open interest, or the number of positions open in existing contracts, hit the landmark one billion megawatt-hours level on the CME Group’s trading platforms this week. CME Group owns NYMEX, a formerly independent exchange that hosts trading in the benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude oil contract. The firm has made a concerted push in building out its energy business across a range of financial products, from floor-traded futures contracts to options and other products across a range of energy commodities. Keep reading →
All hopes have been dashed that a settlement to the debt crisis, which plagued American politics and global markets through the final weeks of July, would result in smooth sailing through August.
Prices for energy commodities were whipsawed amid wild volatility as indicators for the broader economy showed signs of weakening even as Congress finally signed a debt deal. Oil prices, so often a proxy for the broader energy sector, fell sharply on August 8. Keep reading →
