Energy traders are a less visible part of the market compared to retail and wholesale power suppliers. They exist in certain markets to bid on the constantly fluctuating price of electricity, which is useful for owners of power-generating plants to help, for example, lock in a price for electricity in the day ahead.

As more and more renewable energy comes onto the grid, energy traders, utilities, and power-generating companies have to grapple with a much more complex electricity market. Intermittent resources like wind and solar will be sold at certain times of the day, and fossil fuel-based power will be sold at other times of the day. Because some larger fossil fuel-based plants can’t just shut off at a moment’s notice and many renewable sources depend on weather, balancing supply and demand is an increasingly complicated issue. That balance is further complicated by how most markets don’t have vast energy storage resources to draw on, and electricity has to be consumed as soon as it’s made.

Tech companies are stepping in to soothe these relatively new tensions. Industrial machinery and software company General Electric recently announced new additions to its software platform Predix. With its updates, Predix will give energy traders real-time information on plant operations while also offering plant operators guidelines to help them optimize the performance of their machinery.

Predix

GE originally developed Predix for internal use. When the company started building the platform for customers a couple of years ago, it was initially as a way to help those customers monitor industrial tools so that operators could do predictive maintenance on mission-critical parts, seeing as how predictive maintenance is generally cheaper than emergency maintenance. GE, a major supplier of gas turbines and wind turbines, wanted to give its customers an easy way to judge when tune-ups needed to happen. It does that by building “Digital Twins” of industrial assets—that is, a digital representation of a real-life piece of machinery that’s used to gather data on how the machinery operates.

Now GE is using the same platform and data from 100,000 Digital Twins and applying them to energy markets using an application suite called Digital Utility. The Predix-based software is supposed to give energy traders “real-time machine and operations data” on how any particular power plant is working. This ought to help traders make better financial decisions. GE also pushed out a Baseline Security Center application that offers tools to help utilities stay up to date on things like patch management, identity management, network and host hardening, and intrusion detection.

GE’s applications aren’t the only way energy traders are trying to shave market friction off transactions. In Europe, energy-trading firms have just agreed to try out a blockchain system to allow peer-to-peer trades with energy wholesalers. The system being used in this case is called Enerchain, and it helps traders “anonymously send orders to a decentralized orderbook which can be hit by other trading organizations,” according to creator Ponton.

The trial period, which will run until the end of 2017, will allow traders to test the blockchain-based system for its speed and accuracy. The advantage of using a decentralized ledger to make transactions is that processes have the potential to be more efficient and will theoretically incur fewer transaction costs.

The trial involves 23 energy trading firms and power companies. According to Microgrid media, it will be the first full-scale trial of a blockchain-based system in an energy market.