Equinor and BP Swap Offshore Projects, RWE Increases Earnings by 50%, Traders Profit from Renewables

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Energy traders in Europe are profiting from electricity price swings caused by fluctuating renewable energy generation. Equinor and BP are swapping their offshore wind assets to maximize earnings growth. RWE onshore wind and solar increased earnings by 50% in 2023. Spanish renewable energy company Ecoener is entering the Greek market with a 350MW, €300 million investment in wind and solar projects. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lighting Tech. And I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you need actionable information about renewable projects or technologies, check out IntelStor at intelstor.com. A new breed of traders is upending Europe's energy markets, making huge profits from the region's transition to renewable energy. In a Bloomberg article, they go on to note that anonymous firms in Denmark are using computer algorithms, weather data, and meteorological know how to trade electricity contracts. So recently, when fog set in over Eastern Europe, reducing the solar power generation, the traders, computers snapped up some contracts, betting correctly that the short term Electricity prices would spike in Hungary, and they made millions of dollars from just a few minutes of price swings until the fog lifted. Now, Phil, this is really interesting because they're up in Aalborg and Aarhus, Denmark, in their offices, with a bunch of computers, evidently, and trading on the electricity market, so it has wide ramifications in terms of, Money exchange and what the average citizen is going to pay for electricity if you have traders with that sort of technology attacking the market. And this is not very different than what Enron was doing right back in California days. Philip Totaro: Sort of, but it's, I would actually say it's more equivalent to what happening with energy traders in, that year cut market in the United States or, other places in the world where they have a pretty well established, wholesale market, this is I'd classify it as a new breed only from the perspective that again, you already have some of the same companies like Dunce Commodities or RWE or Centrica already have energy trading houses,and it's how they balance their own generation and power offtake. but a lot of these companies are coming in, like you're saying, and they're just using, weather prediction and, algorithms and things like that to, to try and, work the market as much as they can. I don't know, it's interesting, because at the end of the day, it's capitalism at its best, but it is probably going to end up being bad for consumers, both, residential customers and,corporate power off takers because, most of the time while you can lock in a fixed price contract, the overwhelming majority of projects throughout Europe in general are not necessarily on a fixed price power off take contract for especially for renewables, wind, solar, and even battery storage. it's gonna be interesting if the EU decides to start regulating, even Denmark has even suggested that they might try to clamp down a little bit on this, and,the traders weren't that happy about, saying, hey, you're gonna, you're gonna take all this,food off our table, but they, I think it was 20, Yeah. Yeah. In 2022, they made something like 5 billion in revenue,