Natural Gas Scheduling: The Devil’s in the Retail
Natural Gas Schedulers operate in the “eye of the storm”, responsible for getting many things right every day, with substantial dollars at stake, preserving tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars or more of revenue and preventing costly imbalance penalties. Conversations I have had with Schedulers tell of long hours, stress and wondering whether management understands how difficult the task at hand is, especially when the primary tool is spreadsheets, inept software or, worse, a combination of the two.
On any given day, a Natural Gas Scheduler must manage a multitude of tasks and demands from both internal and external parties, with responsibilities varying according to the size of the business. Schedulers across different companies have shared some common themes:
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The prevailing challenge is managing not only all wholesale transactions, but also the dynamic retail physical gas requirements behind the city gate and generating aggregate positions that establish transparency of the physical natural gas demand requirements of the business.
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Tooling is problematic … the most common tool in the hands of the Scheduler are spreadsheets; manually intensive, growing in size, complexity, and number to the point of being unmanageable, not to mention a serious threat to the business when the creator of the spreadsheet moves on.
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An ETRM system is an alternative, however lacks core functionality for managing physical gas behind the city gate, having no ability to:
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create a direct link between wholesale pipeline scheduling and retail city gate delivery requirements,
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handle scenarios involving multiple LDCs, their pools and multi-pipeline and point based MDQs and contractual priorities,
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manage real-time changes associated with daily retail meter reads.
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Whether using spreadsheets or ETRM software, companies with both wholesale and retail operations struggle with aligning positions with volume commitments across wholesale and retail operations.
Under the circumstances, Natural Gas Scheduler frustration and burnout is understandable, but it doesn’t have to be this way! nGenue was designed with the needs of the Natural Gas Scheduler and those of a Natural Gas business in mind … all position and volumetric data is housed in a central repository, fingertip accessible in real-time to support daily scheduling tasks and management decision-making. Further, nGenue task automation eliminates the need to manually manage rates, fees, fuel, MDQs, imbalance, and cashouts. These are automatically calculated by the nGenue system, enabling Schedulers to focus on their mission critical tasks rather than spreadsheet or configuration maintenance.
With all the data in one place and accurate, up to the minute ‘what if’ analyses can be performed, enabling buy and sell decisions to be made confidently based on immediately available information – when the market opportunity is good, it is readily visible substantiating a Buy decision. Best of all, Retail and Wholesale positions are always aligned, significantly reducing the otherwise constant communication required between Retail and Wholesale staff to keep these teams coordinated.
Isn’t it time you started treating your business behind the city gate with the importance it deserves?
End Users, LDCs, Marketers, Pipelines, Producers, and Utilities face increasing competitive and compliance pressures, requiring increased operational efficiency, data integrity and process improvement. Their operational systems must support this, but most don’t. Engage us and we’ll show you how to make a breakthrough. It’s what we do for natural gas companies, and we are experts in our field.
~Ken
