Oct 3, 2025 6 min read Power Markets

How Does ETRM Software Support Power Trading? Use Cases + What to Look For

If you’re managing a growing power portfolio, you need a system that keeps up — one that tracks exposures as they shift, reflects risk in real time, and gives you the data you need to act with confidence.

Key Takeaways

Manual workarounds create risk. Without power-specific tools, teams lose time stitching together data — increasing the chance of delays, blind spots, and bad decisions.
Up-to-date exposures are critical. Power markets shift fast. ETRMs built for power reflect exposures as they change, helping traders respond with speed and confidence.
Power portfolios need purpose-built tools. Traditional systems weren’t designed for power. A modern ETRM offers the scale, flexibility, and precision to keep up.

Power markets are hard enough to keep up with — and they’re only getting more complex.

More congestion. More regulations. More structures to capture, trades to reconcile, and risks to manage. Spreadsheets can’t scale as portfolios become more complex, and legacy systems aren’t built for today’s challenges.

Why Is Power Trading So Complex?
What Makes an ETRM Purpose-built for Power?
Tracking the Lifecycle of a Power Trade
Key Features of an ETRM Built for Power Trading
Managing PPAs, Renewable Certificates, and Power Market Risk in Your ETRM
What to Look for in a Modern ETRM for Power Trading
Why Power Trading Needs a Purpose-Built ETRM

Why Is Power Trading So Complex?

Power trading comes with unique challenges. Unlike many other commodities, electricity must be balanced in real time: supply and demand must match moment to moment, across regionally fragmented markets and shifting regulations.

Markets are fast-moving, and traders don’t just monitor price movements. They track generation, outages, congestion, transmission paths, and changing forecasts — all while adapting to evolving regulatory and market participation rules.

Manual data manipulation takes too long. Every delay introduces risk. And as portfolios grow to include renewable assets and complex PPAs, the operational burden only increases.

To effectively navigate today’s power markets, you need near real-time data with accuracy you can rely on — not just for deal capture, but for forecasting, hedging, and responding to market shifts as soon as they happen.

What Makes an ETRM Purpose-built for Power?

Not all ETRMs are built to handle the complexities of power trading. In fact, many energy trading and risk management systems were originally designed for simpler commodities: where trades follow a linear lifecycle, market data updates slowly, and delivery is less nuanced. That’s not the case with power.

Well-designed ETRM systems are designed to manage the entire power trade lifecycle, offering features like near real-time valuations, trade limit monitoring, certificate matching, and compliance reporting — all of which need to operate at the speed and specificity of the power market.

What Your ETRM Needs to Handle for Power Markets

ETRMs specifically developed for power markets support common power-specific trades and products across forward, real-time, and day-ahead markets, including:

Financial and physical power trades, with attributes like delivery shape, block hours, and region-specific rules
Congestion hedges and transmission rights, used to manage delivery path costs and grid congestion
Day-ahead market positions, cleared via system operators or exchanges
Ancillary services, used to participate in reserve, regulation, or other grid-support functions
Renewable credit instruments, such as certificates or guarantees of origin, tied to compliance or voluntary programs
Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), used to structure long-term offtake agreements with delivery and settlement complexity

Because of the complexity of these trades and market requirements, power-specific functionality within an ETRM is required to manage them. Without it, you will need to manually collect and evaluate constantly changing information. Minutes (and even hours) can be lost between data acquisition and data response, leaving you vulnerable to outdated data and exposed to unnecessary risk.

Elektra, Molecule’s module for power, was purpose-built to model financial and physical power, including modeling power block shapes, asset volumes, and ISO/TSO-specific data to accurately capture power trades and enable risk management not available in ERPs or spreadsheets. Elektra’s embedded block logic framework allows trades to be compiled to summary positions or broken down to minute-by-minute granularity for clear, accurate views in near real time. Learn more about Elektra.

Tracking the Lifecycle of a Power Trade

Trade capture is just the start. Between forecasting, delivery, and reconciliation, every step in the trade lifecycle introduces risk — and complexity.

Modern ETRMs purpose-built for power markets go beyond deal capture. They track and automate the entire post-trade lifecycle across physical and financial trades.

The best ETRM for power markets will:

Seamlessly and automatically capture trades with power-specific attributes like delivery hours and block type
Incorporate proprietary/fundamental load, generation, and price forecasts into system
Integrate with system operators to ingest market results, including schedules, dispatch instructions, congestion and balancing data, ancillary service awards, and settlement details
Validate and handle settlement logic for both vanilla and structured instruments
Manage the complete lifecycle of your renewables certificates — including trading, forecasting, minting, and traceback
Support PPAs throughout the contract lifecycle, from valuations to reporting

When your ETRM automates these steps in near real time — and integrates with exchanges, ISOs, TSOs, registries, and market data sources — you get a single, accurate view of your entire portfolio. That means faster decisions, backed by data you can trust.

Check out our Power Trading Glossary for key terms and concepts in power trading.

Key Features of an ETRM Built for Power Trading

Power pricing changes fast… and changes often.

Between day-ahead awards, real-time market fluctuations, and grid congestion costs, even small delays or gaps in your pricing data can mean the difference between profitable decisions and costly ones.

When every 15-minute interval matters, you can’t risk outdated data, broken workflows, or missing settlement info.

Here are the key features an ETRM built for power trading should have:

Automatically pull in market data and awards from connected ISOs and TSOs
Report on forward and intra-month positions and P&L
Automatically reconcile with futures clearing merchants/brokers
Support reconciliation and tracking for generation and storage trades
Generate confirmations and invoices
Provide all trade lifecycle data on-screen and via APIs

In short: the best ETRM for power trading delivers fast and accurate pricing, forward visibility, and a clear understanding of how market changes affect your bottom line.

Molecule’s Elektra brings speed, clarity, and control to power trading. It connects directly to exchanges, ISOs, and brokers to reconcile trades, pull pricing and settlement data, all at 15-minute granularity — so you can track exposures, value positions, and manage risk with confidence. With an API-first design and built-in block logic, Elektra keeps your data flowing and your decisions sharp.

Managing PPAs, Renewable Certificates, and Power Market Risk in Your ETRM

Accurate volumetric data tracking is table stakes in power — but actually executing it across deliveries, contracts, and certificates is where many systems fall short. A purpose-built ETRM should track and compare actual volumes against contracts and reconcile renewable certificates with physical deliveries — keeping your numbers both auditable and reliable.

What To Look for in a Modern ETRM for Power Trading

The most important feature of a power-ready ETRM is that it is purpose-built for power portfolios, PPAs, and renewables.

It should have:

Flexibility and scalability necessary to handle growing complexity and larger volumes of data
Prebuilt integrations for power trading with ISOs, TSOs, exchanges, brokers, and market data sources
Support for diverse energy commodities (power, carbon, gas, RECs)
Built-in features for physical commodity management, including product mapping, market and exchange data integrations, and ICE product standardization
Pre-built and custom reporting, including finance, risk, and regulatory reporting
Cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture that enables the system to scale as needed
Fast implementation with data and workflows available in near real-time

Molecule’s cloud-native design enables easy integration, API-based extensibility, and flexibility for future business expansion. Its multi-tenant platform supports automation, from trade capture to settlement, in near real time. Integrations with the data sources you rely on (exchanges, ISOs, TSOs, registries, market data sources) enable reliable, accurate position, exposure, and P&L reporting.

Why Power Trading Needs a Purpose-Built ETRM

Power market positions shift by the hour — and sometimes, by the minute. As demand increases, regulations evolve, and products get more complex, power traders need tools that do more than capture trades. They need systems that help them stay ahead of market shifts, volatility, and risk.

That’s where a modern ETRM purpose-built for power makes a difference.

Instead of piecing together information across systems and spreadsheets, a well-designed ETRM is your system of record — capturing trades, reconciling data, tracking exposure, and exposing risks in real-time. When market conditions shift, or when a PPA actualizes differently than expected, you’re not left guessing. You already have the numbers — and the confidence — to act.

Power trading may be getting more complex, but with the right ETRM, you will be able to react with confidence — allowing you to scale your business and profit.