The Power of Transparency and Competitive Intelligence

Transparency and competitive intelligence are powerful tools for promoting market efficiency and optimal decision making. Investopedia defines transparency as the access and proper disclosure of financial information, explaining that transparency helps reduce uncertainty, allowing market participants to base decisions on the same data. Bloomberg Professional Services explains that increased data transparency in energy markets will ultimately decrease unnecessary price volatility, and lead to better investment decisions and market stability. Competitive intelligence is the collection and analysis of information on competitors, customers, and market factors that impact a business’s competitive advantage (Investopedia 2021). 

Price intelligence is a subset of competitive intelligence that can be extremely useful.  Pricing intelligence allows organizations to make decisions on their pricing in order to sell products at fair market value, while also ensuring they make their profit margins (Wiser).  Both market transparency and competitive intelligence can provide insight to companies looking to optimize business strategies and operations. 

Traditionally, it has been difficult for wholesale market participants to easily utilize transparent pricing, transaction, and competitive intelligence data on other market participants’ activities. It’s not that the data doesn’t exist; buried within the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC’s) Electric Quarterly Report (EQR) is a goldmine of insightful transaction intelligence. The problem is, the way this data is published further compounds the Big Data problems facing the players in the energy industry. EQR data is published as a massive dataset, lacking data standardization, and transforming the data into easily accessible and decipherable formats requires significant time and data expertise.

However, the transformed data does provide detailed and powerful transaction and contract information.  Competitive retail power purchases, unit level transactions with the ISOs (Day-Ahead and Real-Time) and contract terms for energy sales and Power Purchase Agreements are among the many types of transactions captured by the data.  With insight gained from this transformed EQR data, businesses can:

• Better inform business strategies

• Power business negotiations with transparent insight into fair market prices of electric products

• Easily discover potential customers approaching contract expiration

• Gain granular insight into competitive pricing and operational strategy