Energy market complexity remains the biggest opportunity
As the energy transition accelerates, market complexity continues to increase alongside it. This in turn creates real opportunities for those equipped to take advantage.
As the energy transition accelerates, market complexity continues to increase alongside it. This in turn creates real opportunities for those equipped to take advantage.
As the energy transition accelerates, market complexity continues to increase alongside it. This in turn creates real opportunities for those equipped to take advantage.
In his latest article, Helmut Spindler, Volue's General Manager for Trading & Optimisation, outlines how we support our customers to deliver success, provides an overview of activity to date in 2026, and discusses what is to come over the next few months.
Trading intervals are tightening, intermittent generation is increasing, and more players are entering short-term power markets. The result is simple: decision cycles are shorter, mistakes are costlier, and efficiency matters more than ever before.
From where I sit, the last few months have made that pace impossible to ignore. Customers are pushing for more automation, tighter control, and systems they can trust when markets move fast, without turning their daily operations into a patchwork of manual workarounds. I remain convinced that keeping up with accelerating electrification, rising demand volatility, and the shift to renewables requires an integrated approach to trading and optimisation. As a team, we have been working hard to meet that need.
Across European power and gas markets, demand for modern scheduling and nomination technology continues to rise. Many organisations still rely on older tools and processes that simply were not designed for today's intraday pace. As products multiply and tolerance for error falls, reliability, auditability, and speed must come together. It is no longer enough to have manual fixes layered on top.
Over the coming months, I foresee that onboarding speed and clean integrations will matter as much as features. With shorter trading intervals and growing cross-border participation, the operational overhead of 'just keeping things running' could prove to be a real cost.
This is why our March acquisition of dispoEnergy matters. dispoEnergy is a cloud-native, plug-and-play scheduling and nomination platform for European power and gas markets. It allows us to serve both ends of the spectrum: enterprise-grade deployments with Volue Scheduler (DeltaXE), and a simpler, lightweight setup for smaller utilities, traders, and asset operators who just need something that works, integrates cleanly, and stays stable. In both cases, the goal is the same: scale participation without scaling complexity.
Execution performance was one of the fastest-moving conversations this year, and I think those close to trading will have seen that for themselves. That is why we have been combining the strengths of AlgoTrader and PowerBot, culminating in what we refer to as our Smart Closer strategy. Smart Closer, when used within PowerBot, delivers a multi-tactic execution engine for intraday position closing. This is not about replacing traders; it is about traders having the ability to perform better, with greater ROI. It gives them the opportunity to take repetitive, time-critical execution tasks and make them more consistent, more controllable, and easier to run day after day.
Teams typically care about three things: performance, risk, and operational effort. Smart Closer provides better execution performance and reduced imbalance volumes, helping to make outcomes more predictable. And with lighter configuration, it is easier to roll out consistently across desks. I have been speaking about this to several of our customers over the last few months and many have already signed up and are undertaking testing now.
Of course, ease of use will determine the pace of adoption. Traders need transparency and the ability to intervene when required. With an updated user interface for PowerBot planned for mid-year, we are focused on making these workflows clearer and easier to operate at scale.
Batteries are quickly becoming some of the most operationally demanding - and commercially important - assets in short-term power markets.
To make coordination simpler, we have seen more teams moving towards a single environment for short-term power operations, where forecasting, monitoring, optimisation, bidding, execution, and physical dispatch live together rather than in isolated workflows. This is the thinking behind the Volue Trading Suite (smartPulse), which continues to give our customers a practical way to reduce handovers, maintain a clean system of record, and scale automation without losing control.
In the months ahead, we expect the gap to widen between those that can automate with control and those still relying on manual workarounds.
The last three months provided a clear reminder to me of where the market is heading. As such, my focus remains on helping our customers move faster, stay compliant, and capture more value from short-term markets, supported by automation that works.
Ultimately, the winners will be those who embrace market complexity. By connecting forecasting, optimisation, execution, and physical operations in one coherent workflow, teams can react faster while maintaining the transparency and control that regulators, risk teams, and traders all depend on. That is where we are investing our effort now, and it is the direction I believe the market will continue to reward.