BISE – Call for Papers Issue 1/2012

Excerpt

There are two major factors gaining increasing impact on the IT landscape of businesses in the energy industry: With the liberalization of energy markets (particularly in the electricity market) within the European Union, utilities have to face many new challenges. A central component of market liberalization is guaranteeing discrimination-free grid access, which results in structural changes in the energy industry. In order to prevent preferential treatment of network operators which are also electricity suppliers and/or electricity providers, the divisions for generation, transmission, and distribution have to be separated (unbundling), even though full independence is achieved only by separated ownership. Minimum requirement is the separation of accounting. For energy suppliers, procurement optimization for cost reduction does no longer only comprise the procurement of primary energy, which is converted into electricity in (own) power plants, but also the procurement of electricity itself. For consumers, new possibilities emerge for covering demand beyond mid- and long-term tariff-based contracts. The operation of own small-scale plants for combined heat and power generation at the location of use and short-term trading on power markets is becoming increasingly efficient. The possibility of trading power leads to a variety of new products and potential trading partners. All of these issues lead to an increasingly complex electricity market. …