The operational model that worked in 2015 is quietly destroying value in 2026. A few years ago, trading power across European markets was manageable. You had a day-ahead auction, a handful of bilateral deals, and a nomination to the TSO. Two or three applications. A small team. Clear workflows.
Today, a mid-sized energy company with a mixed renewable and flexible portfolio might trade simultaneously across day-ahead auctions, intraday continuous markets, and multiple ancillary products — across multiple bidding zones, each with its own market rules, settlement windows, and regulatory obligations.
"The operational model that worked in 2015 is quietly destroying value in 2026."
Ask any short-term trader what their day looks like and you'll hear a version of the same story: four to six applications open at once, constant context-switching, manual spreadsheets bridging the gaps, and a creeping sense that somewhere, value is being left on the table.
It's not a people problem. Traders are skilled and motivated. It's an architecture problem. The tools were built for a simpler world, and the gaps between them are growing.
Every time a production plan changes — a wind forecast drops, a battery discharge cycle completes — someone has to manually coordinate the downstream impact. What does that mean for intraday positions? For the ancillary commitment? For the nomination to the TSO? In fast-moving markets, the answer often comes too late to capture full value.
The energy industry is going through a structural transition that doesn't get enough attention outside of technology circles. We call it the shift from Operations 1.0 to Operations 2.0.
Operations 1.0 was sequential and relatively static: plan, bid, trade, nominate. Each step happened in order, in dedicated tools, with time to breathe between them.
Operations 2.0 is continuous and deeply interconnected. Production plans update in real-time. Market windows overlap. Ancillary activation and intraday trading happen simultaneously. The moment a schedule changes, the ripple effects across markets need to be coordinated in minutes — not hours.
Companies that are still running Operations 1.0 toolchains under Operations 2.0 market conditions are paying a hidden tax every day: in missed trades, in reconciliation effort, in compliance exposure, in operational risk.
Here's what most technology vendors won't tell you: the cost of integrating and maintaining multiple specialised trading applications is a significant and growing line item — even if it never appears as such in a budget.
Every new market you access adds integration points. Every application upgrade requires re-testing connections. Every portfolio change needs to be replicated manually across systems. And when something breaks at 3am during an intraday window, finding the failure point across four disconnected systems is not a good way to spend the night.
These costs are real. They just tend to hide in engineering overhead, operational incidents, and the quiet underperformance of a trading desk running below its potential.
At Volue, we've been listening closely to the trading desks we work with. Not just hearing feature requests, but trying to understand the underlying operational pattern — what the workday actually looks like when you're trading across multiple markets with multiple tools.
What we've learned has shaped a significant new direction for our trading portfolio. We're not ready to share the full picture yet — but we're working on something that addresses the structural problem, not just the symptoms.
In the coming weeks, we'll be sharing more about how we think the market should work, what the ideal workflow looks like, and where we believe the energy trading industry is heading. Watch this space.
Next in this series → The hidden cost of fragmented trading toolchains: a closer look at what's really happening on trading desks across Europe.