INSIGHT
Operational and Strategic Decision-making
Visualisations
OPERATIONAL AND STRATEGIC DECISION-MAKING

Advanced Energy Trading and Wheeling Visualisations for Operational and Strategic Decision-making in the South African Electricity Industry

2023.06.12 | Enerweb Chief Innovation Officer

In an era when the electricity industry is undergoing extensive digitisation, particularly in the realm of electricity trading, the use of data as well as energy trading and risk management (ETRM) analytics has become crucial for making operational and strategic decisions.

At Enerweb, we strive to remain at the forefront of leveraging effective data-driven decision-making via interactive and dynamic visual dashboards. We continually strive to produce ‘actionable insight’ graphical interfaces that enable effective decision-making in this complex world of electricity trading.

Enerweb’s Data Visualiser product provides interactive and dynamic dashboards to configure, access, and analyse the vast quantities of data associated with the electricity trading environment. Our product suites span the full spectrum of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics areas with forecasting models, wheeling allocation optimizers and long-term trading risk models incorporated.

What are Actionable Insights?

Actionable insights obtained from the visualisations of electricity trading and wheeling analytics refer to the clear, specific pieces of (visually driven) information derived from data analytics, which can directly influence business decisions and strategies.

These insights help trading organisations to identify opportunities for improvement, and potential risks and trends in their operations or market spaces. The ‘actionable’ aspect means the data is presented in a manner that allows businesses to take immediate actions, enhancing efficiency, productivity, and overall business performance.

Why Data Visualiser for Energy Trading and Wheeling

Visual dashboards are effective at communicating data-driven actionable insights and decisions because they:

  • Present data in a way that is easy to understand. Humans more easily understand visual data representation and we can process information more quickly when it is presented in this way. Dashboards use charts, graphs, and other visuals to make the outputs of the data analytics more accessible and easier to understand.
  • Highlight temporal, spatial, or hierarchical trends and patterns. Dynamic and interactive visualisations help users identify trends and patterns in data that may not be obvious when data is presented in a table or spreadsheet. This can help traders make better decisions by providing them with insights into how data is changing over time, location, or structure.
  • Enable traders to drill down into data. Interactive dashboards allow users to drill down (spatially, hierarchically, temporally) into data to get a more detailed view of specific areas. This can be helpful for traders who want to understand the underlying causes of trends or patterns observed, and want to simply aggregate or disaggregate the information presented.
  • Are highly customisable. Enerweb dashboards can be customised to meet the needs of different stakeholders involved in electricity trading. This allows participants, ranging from asset owners and operators to virtual wheeling settlement providers, to select the data that is displayed on their dashboards, the format in which the data is displayed, and the level of detail shown.

Overall, visual dashboards are an effective way to communicate data-driven decisions, because they make the underlying data analytics more accessible, understandable, and actionable.

Benefits of Data Visualisers in Energy Trading and Wheeling

  • Improved decision-making. Dashboards can help electricity traders make better decisions by providing them with a clear and concise overview of their generation and consumption profiles, their trading positions, and their risk exposures. This can help traders identify areas where they need to improve and make changes to their trading or contracting strategies.
  • Increased productivity. Dashboards can help traders save time by providing them with a wide variety of information (e.g. weather, network information, consumption info, load shedding status, etc.) with which they can make decisions quickly and easily.
  • Improved communication. Dashboards can help improve communication between different departments or teams within the trader’s organisation. This can help ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals.

Technology of Data Visualiser Products

Enerweb’s Data Visualiser product provides interactive and dynamic data visualisation for a host of Enerweb analytics products (e.g. Trade Optimiser and Risk Manager), primarily using an innovative combination of R Shiny and Python technologies.

Shiny is a full web framework that allows data scientists to use R or Python, and in some cases both at the same time. R is currently the most popular statistics modelling language globally, while Python stands as the most popular data science language.

Furthermore, when comparing leading brand products such as Tableau and PowerBI, Shiny is a very strong choice for those looking for complete control over user interface/user experience (UI/UX) in single integrated web and/or mobile solutions. For wider and faster adoption of the applications, the UX is critical, and the Shiny framework is a strong choice for delivering such benefits [1].

The specialised Shiny, R and Python interaction form part of the Enerweb WolfStack AWS solution. The WolfStack technology stack is built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS), with WolfStack delivering cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications using serverless Workflow Orchestrated Lambda Functions (WOLF) [2].

The Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) service plays a key role in managing and scheduling tasks executed through the AWS Lambda functions, and this combination furthermore seamlessly integrates with Enerweb’s Energy Trading transactional product suites.

These technologies and integrations enable quick adaptation of trading decisions or modifications in trading strategy into the transactional space, where they feed into trading schedules and pricing schedules in the front office trading activities, and into physical and financial settlements in the back office trading activities.

The above powerful combinations allow one to create dynamic charts, mobile-friendly interactive maps, comprehensive data tables, as well as 3D visualisations. Incorporating these interactive and user-friendly features significantly enhance trading activities for better profitability and sustainability.

Agile Delivery of Data Visualiser Dashboards

With the Data Visualiser ‘toolbox’ described above, Enerweb delivers extremely fast-to-market solutions. Enerweb is ISO9001 certified, and its processes are built around agile methodologies which prioritise customer collaboration and incremental delivery. This approach involves the customer throughout the delivery lifecycle, rather than only at the beginning and end stages.

Regular demos and feedback are essential to this collaborative approach. We focus on evolving with the customer to achieve the final outcome. Our architecture supports rapid deployment via Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, which means we encourage continuous changes and updates to the dashboards.

Examples of Data Visualiser Dashboards

  • Wheeling and Greening

    Until the market environment matures, the City of Cape Town will supply deficit energy at regulated tariffs, while surplus energy will be taken at zero price unless the customer has instituted ‘greening’. Customer greening will allow customers to green the electrical energy used in production, and offset deficit energy.

    Interactive visualisation (zoomable, clickable, drillable) showing how City of Cape Town will purchase surplus energy wheeled from the customer at a time-of-use feed-in tariff, and allow the green benefits to be retained by the customer to green the deficit energy purchased.

  • Optimal Wheeling of Renewable Energy

    Energy from a solar producer must be distributed, or allocated to multiple customer offtakers. This can be done manually or via an automated algorithm. The figure shows an interactive simulation with optimal wheeling allocation, graphically comparing optimal with manually selected ratios.

    On the chart, the 3 colours represent the 3 customers (off-takers), the consumed energy has 2 stacked bars showing optimal vs. manual adjusted. Two y-axes, one for KW and the other for R/kWh.

  • Market Intelligence Dashboard

    In this project, we linked load profile time series data with geo-spatial data, as well as historic newspaper articles, including full text search, in one combined visualisation.

    Dashboard that through sentiment analysis, links multiple data and data types on an interactive dashboard using Enerweb’s Data Visualisation product.

OUTPUT EXAMPLES

Summary

By providing actionable insights on top of its suite of energy trading and risk management analytical products, Enerweb’s Data Visualiser product delivers interactive and dynamic dashboards that help the parties involved in electricity trading make informed decisions, improve efficiency, and increase profitability.

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