How Energy Harbor uses energy trading and risk management solutions to help its customers achieve sustainability goals

Challenge

Energy Harbor is a producer and retail supplier of energy, serving nearly one million consumer and business customers and producing 30 million megawatt hours per year of clean, carbon-free energy with their nuclear fleet. The company manages data inputs for generation supply, wholesale trading, and retail load forecasting, to provide clean energy to its customers.

This is no simple task. It involves evaluating long- and short-term risks, leading  gas supply interactions, developing models for various markets, negotiating market volatility, and managing risk for the company and for customers.

Solution

Energy Harbor’s job meets these challenges with help from Hitachi Energy’s energy trading and risk management (ETRM) solution, TRMTracker.

Part of a comprehensive portfolio of award-winning ETRM solutions, TRMTracker provides Energy Harbor with a single source of truth that lets them:

• Track Energy Attribute Certificates
• Manage greenhouse gas emission and carbon accounting
• More easily engage in multi-commodity trading
• Gain real-time visibility and enhance decision-making
• Improve hedging and reduce missed deal opportunities

Energy Harbor uses TRMTracker to manage wholesale trades, retail load forecasting and forecasts for the company’s carbon-free inventory. The system is also used to keep track of carbon-free-only customers.  “We have customers who have elected to consume only a carbon-free product. Having a system that maintains both pieces — the carbon-free inventory and customers desiring carbon-free energy — allows us to monitor how much more carbon-free energy we have available to offer new customers at any time,” says Angelita Laymon, manager of portfolio optimization, Energy Harbor.

TRMTracker is also used to help protect the company by ensuring the right hedging strategy is in place to manage risk.

“Our energy trading and risk management system allows Energy Harbor to compile a complete position from the information in the system and manage the entire value chain of their energy portfolio,” says Uday Baral, head of global energy planning and trading, Hitachi Energy. “Additionally, the software supports their desire to manage their carbon neutrality goals while staying profitable.”

Impact

Few industries face the broad range of fluctuating variables and risk potential as do today’s energy producers and suppliers. Companies like Energy Harbor need to satisfy unprecedented sustainability requirements set by themselves, their customers and regulators.

Energy Harbor produces clean energy, purchases clean energy, and with the help of TRMTracker, helps customers meet their environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals by offsetting their energy consumption with carbon-free power. The system also allows them to provide certificates to carbon-free customers that track their carbon-free usage. In this way, Energy Harbor helps companies offset their carbon footprint by matching their energy consumption with emissions-free energy certificates that the provider retires on the customers’ behalf.

For Energy Harbor, TRMTracker has opened up a world of new possibilities in managing the problems, risks and price volatilities that are inherent in the energy industry. Laymon adds, “We’re using data every day in new and powerful ways. We have so much information that we’ve never had before.”