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Comment by sambucini | Hacker News Reader

I work in energy trading in Europe and for us this is a blessing. Of course we store our time series TZ aware, but many less professional small utilities or other market participants (incl. Grid operators) who e.g. Order power on hourly resolution with tz-unaware excel spreadsheets via email are a nightmare as each participants treatment of double or missing hours is different and requires manual processing.

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Why don't you just make a system that the clients must enter data through? Instead of accepting spreadsheets...

But, yes, I can imagine this is a nightmare..

> Why don't you just make a system that the clients must enter data through? Instead of accepting spreadsheets...

It’s cheap to train people to fill out a spreadsheet. If you force people to use a custom data portal, you’ll likely increase error rates and give your counterparties a reason to prefer other shops.

Supply and demand. I would guess the clients can just go "no" and you either loose the electricity they provide or allow spreadsheets.

Working in the same sector, I can confirm this. We try to offer pretty much any half-way reasonable interface to our clients for that exact reason, be it spreadsheets or csv via mail or SFTP, REST APIs or a web interface.

yeah, it's both what you say and sales people's poor understanding of how annoying that is (and the fact that they get rewarded for closed contracts where operational costs dont matter)

I did some work in this sector about 10 years ago. We wrote a system to parse these spreadsheets, and convert the various units of measure. At the time, we were processing the data faster than anyone else and used that data to our advantage.

The reason we couldn't mandate our own system was that many facilities are jointly owned, and we only had the primary ownership of a minority of facilities.

Not surprised this hasn't changed !

I can imagine. In my country the electricity meters only deal with winter time (UTC+2). Most suppliers have different rates for day and night, so in winter night rates start at 12am and in summer they start at 11pm (or is it the other way around?) so nothing needs to be changed on the meter.

Naively I would like to think this was all done using a designed system, but this makes sense.

Any documented cases of the lights going out due to an email ending up in the spam folder?

To my knowledge, you won't loose power because your energy provider forgot to buy energy from the market, they still have to pay for it though (probably with late fees).

It depends on the market design of course, but generally, if too many energy providers did not match their consumption with generation (or bought power), that could lead to power outages.

Concerning the 'late fees': if your consumption exceeds your production, you pay what is called balancing energy. Essentially, you have to buy the energy for a price that is set by the transmission system operator depending on the total imbalance in the grid. In some cases, this might actually be beneficial to the energy provider as the balancing energy is sometimes cheaper than the prices you get on the sport market close to gate closure.

Hey, sorry for the OT message.

I like to connect with other devs working in the same industry as me. I work for Contigo Software, we make ETRM software and various other things for the energy industry.

There's various ways to contact me in my profile if your interested in chatting.

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