Energy buyers from industrial and commercial companies have one thing in common: they want cheaper electricity and gas prices and lower energy costs. To achieve this, they often spend a lot of time and effort, work through many Excel spreadsheets and accept tedious processes. Digitalisation in the energy market and, in particular, completely online-based electricity and gas procurement offer new opportunities. The company enPORTAL, which is driving the digital transformation in online energy purchasing, has summarised the changes for purchasing. It becomes clear: Those who do not procure online are giving away optimisation potential and opportunities to reduce time and costs.

Established online energy purchasing via the cloud

Today, energy buyers from companies in almost all sectors still have to put up with lengthy market enquiries and laborious tendering processes for electricity and gas prices. Thanks to the digitalisation of the energy market, energy purchasing can now be carried out completely online. One of the pioneers is enPORTAL with its online-based trading platform, which industrial and commercial customers as well as suppliers can access simultaneously. All communication takes place transparently via the cloud. All users are networked with each other to handle the online tendering process. Managing directors or technical managers can also implement their energy procurement professionally online and no longer need energy consultants to do so.

Advantage 1: Online-based energy data management

While all electricity and gas data used to be scattered in countless Excel spreadsheets, enPORTAL has clearly listed and presented everything in its online portal. Like in an online filing cabinet, customers have permanent access to all consumption, costs and contracts. Energy data management can be carried out from anywhere at any time. The development of energy purchases also becomes visible and comprehensible. Changes in consumption or tender information, for example, can be processed in real time and also saved in PDF or Excel format at any time. This way, buyers and decision-makers always have an overview.

Advantage 2: Efficiency in online tendering

A major advantage of digitalisation is easier processing of the tender, which takes place completely online with enPORTAL, for example. As with the booking of airline tickets, the commercial purchase of electricity and gas is mapped via the cloud. Since all energy data and load profiles of enPORTAL customers are stored in the online portal, up to 550 energy suppliers can be informed about the tender at the same time. This can be done more quickly with a click than in the past, so that favourable market developments on the Leipzig EEX exchange can be used. Based on the detailed load profile data of each offtake point, energy suppliers can calculate an individual offer and feed it back into the portal. In this way, the greatest competition can be generated among the suppliers in the energy market and the best price can be achieved at the time of the online tender.

Advantage 3: Automatic overview of offers in the bidder's list

Since the digitalisation of the energy market, it is no longer necessary for suppliers to laboriously compare offers. Energy supply offers are automatically listed on enPORTAL and sorted according to the pure energy price. You can immediately see which supplier offers the best electricity or gas price and the desired contractual conditions. What used to take several weeks is now done in just a few hours because all parties involved have access to the same database in real time.

Advantage 4: Short decision-making periods

Electricity and gas prices change hourly on the EEX exchange. The longer suppliers have to commit to their offer, the higher they calculate the risk premiums. On the customer side, this ultimately leads to higher costs. Since all offers are sorted according to the pure energy price in the bidder's list and are available in a comparable form, the binding period at enPORTAL is 2 hours. Within this time, buyers can decide on a supplier and thus shorten their decision-making period. This is a simple way to reduce costs - because short deadlines lead to lower electricity and gas prices. Even the smallest changes in the price of energy have an impact on the total costs if consumption is high, as was shown in the 2015 enPORTAL study. "In the diverse energy market with many suppliers and exchange-traded products, the offers vary so that great competition and short reaction times lead to the best price - those who understand this realise the optimisation potential behind it," says Clemens Graf von Wedel, Managing Director of enPORTAL GmbH, which he runs together with Rainer Otto.