e-Acumen releases AcuPower 2.0 software

New module lets traders and analysts model power pricing

e-Acumen has released a major upgrade to its AcuPower software. The program, a web-based power forecasting solution, helps power traders make better trading decisions. Based on a new approach for delivering data and applications, AcuPower functions entirely via web browser and requires no separate software to be installed. San Francisco-based e-Acumen is an Application Services Provider (ASP) that features Internet software development and power industry & trading analytics expertise. The company offers solutions for power trading and risk management. AcuPower provides robust analytics on top of an open framework and a database of key fundamentals data. By allowing traders to modify the data and use their own data and insights, AcuPower gives each trader unique and critical information on power price levels and movement.

Because it includes a comprehensive database of fundamental market data that e-Acumen constantly updates, AcuPower removes the burden of collecting and maintaining such data internally. This data includes current information on all generating units in the continental US and Canada, current and historical weather forecasts, historical load and weather data, and other data that is constantly being collected, cleaned and integrated. In addition, AcuPower allows the customer to include internal, proprietary data in a secure and private way.

AcuPower provides highly accurate load forecasts for any part of the continental US and overlays them on the corresponding supply stacks with a few mouse clicks. This gives a quick and reliable indication of underlying price factors. All assumptions can be instantly viewed and modified, such as the weather input into the load forecast or forced outages of individual units. This allows the trader to refine the results according to his own insights, and the resulting changes are viewed immediately and saved as part of that trader's unique profile.

New features in AcuPower 2.0 include:

• Highly granular load forecasting utilizing multiple temperature-sensitive models, more temperature variables for multiple weather stations per UPA (Utility Planning Area), and our proprietary, structural neural network model
  
• SuperUser settings that allow an administrator to set new system and data defaults for a trading floor
  
• Supply stack shifters that allow quick modeling of power imports/exports and price margins
  
• ISO zonal prices and loads and price/load search, enabling traders to display historical ISO zonal prices for days when the actual peak load was close to the forecasted peak load, which provides an excellent predictor of the price range to expect for the forecast day

Optional modules for AcuPower include:

• Daily Hub Prices from Power Markets Week
  
• Integration with BestWeather

AcuPower has been developed with the help of industry leaders, and is in use by several, including Coral Energy, Edison Mission Energy and others. A number of leading trading floors are realizing that the demands of the technology and data can best be handled by outsourcing to an Internet-savvy vendor.

In addition to its sophisticated modeling capabilities and broad range of current data, AcuPower comes with an affordable price tag. The cost of AcuPower is the equivalent of the fees for the kinds of data feeds that AcuPower includes (such as weather feeds). And unlike typical data feeds, AcuPower aggregates data on your behalf so you can use it without the maintenance and IT overhead. AcuPower also provides significant additional value added with analytics that turn that data into useful information. The company's service for providing skill-rated weather forecasts, BestWeather, can be integrated with AcuPower for the best possible power forecasts.

Edited by Stephen Heiser