Live energy price data feeds: Montel's automated solutions

What are the XLF and API feeds? 

Able to display the data available in Montel Online, energy traders, analysts and even energy managers from energy intensive industries are finding uses for Montel’s data feeds.

This includes data from more than 20 energy exchanges and brokers from around the world. As the energy transition continues to transform these uncertain markets, more and more businesses are realising the value of this information.

What this means for the end user, is that live energy exchange prices and fundamental data for power, gas, coal, oil, carbon and other environmental markets can be fed directly into your systems and spreadsheets.

Subscribers can access both live orders and trades, as well as historical trades, end-of-day prices and volumes.

Why receive the data this way? 

So what is the advantage of this? Put simply, it is the ability to combine the prices with your own data to carry out further analysis. For energy market analysts, this could mean identifying trends in order to work out when to buy and sell.  

Data fed in this way comes directly from the exchanges too, giving users instant access to price changes.

For energy consumers, this could mean following prices in order to decide when to hedge your energy purchasing contracts.

Signing up to excel feeder enables you to access price data whenever you need it - which helps keep your energy costs as low as possible. The charting and analysis tools contained within Montel Online also means they can manage their business energy costs more easily.

Both products are easy to use too. In Montel XLF, you can just scroll to the contract you are looking for e.g. German power.

You can then see the various sources that Montel collates this data from (energy exchanges and brokers in this case). The most liquid one in this example is the European Energy Exchange (EEX). Simply select that option and use the filters to find the exact product you are looking for e.g. front-month. 

 Once this is selected, the data is pulled through from the latest available update time. Fundamental data including power flows, gas storage levels and more are also available via the Excel Feeder.

Ready made templates, among other features, can also feed live or historical data to Short Run Marginal Costs calculations – enabling easy calculation of both spark and dark spreads. 

Montel WebAPI is similarly easy to use, with simple queries required in order to pull through updated data. 

How are people already using the data feeds? 

The winner of that particular competition was Katri from Wienerberger AG, who described how she uses the excel feeder to provide a weekly report covering percentage changes in the prices of various energy commodities.

By selecting the relevant contracts and setting up some relatively simple formulas, Katri was able to automate this aspect of her work, saving herself time and allowing her to focus on different priorities. 

In another example, Thorsten from NEW’Energie displayed their example which monitors intraday price movements across power, gas, coal, carbon and oil.

With all the relevant data displayed graphically side-by-side in excel, it makes it easy for Thorsten to see what is going on with just a quick glance – something which is crucial for an energy provider such as NEW’energie who needs to manage their trading positions.