E.ON forms new power and gas unit

German energy group E.ON established its own procurement and marketing function for the German, British and Swedish markets.

The so-called Market Operations teams in these countries will focus on transactions on wholesale energy markets and the grid operators’ balancing markets,  E.ON said on Monday.

They will be primarily tasked with purchasing power and gas for customers and marketing the production from renewable sources for the E.ON companies.

E.ON’s former energy trading business and related market access was transferred to the now independent affiliate Uniper, which had been spun off in September 2016.

In each country E.ON has set up a team of about 20 experts, which will conclude deals for power, natural gas as well as green certificates directly on the markets.

“This is mainly done for durations of three years in advance up to individual hours for intraday purchases and sales. All activities are clearly focused on hedging E.ON´s price and volume risks instead of proprietary trading,” the statement said.

“Also, we will concentrate more on the marketing and optimization of flexibilities created by the growing integration of our customers’ decentral generation and storage capacities,” said Sven Otten, Senior Vice President Energy Management of E.ON SE in Essen. “In this way we provide the commercial interface into the commodity and network services markets, while at the same time supporting our growing customer solutions business,” he added.

As of now, E.ON is doing business again on the key energy wholesale markets in Germany, the UK and Sweden. This includes bilateral deals with other energy companies as well as transactions on energy exchanges such as EPEX Spot, PEGAS, ICE, Nord Pool and Nasdaq Nordic.

E.ON already entered the Hungarian and Czech markets on October 1, 2016 and January 1, 2017, respectively. In Italy the market entry is planned for January 1, 2018.

The company did not reveal any information on power and gas volumes.