In today’s deregulated markets, retail electricity providers face the complex challenge of balancing supply and demand. This delicate balance relies on one consistent factor that separates successful retailers from the rest: the accuracy of their retail load forecast. In an increasingly volatile landscape, an accurate load forecast isn't just a competitive advantage — it's become a mission-critical risk management and growth lever.
The high stakes of load risk management: why “good enough” forecasts are holding back retailers’ growth
Retail electricity providers face a daily balancing act managing load requirements within a fast-moving, highly competitive market. Forecasting that load can be a competitive advantage and profit-driving lever at the heart of a retailer’s growth strategy.
At its core, a load forecast is the financial blueprint to optimize supply procurement, minimize energy risk, and ultimately offer more competitive rates for electricity consumers. However, load forecast inaccuracies can result in costly power market activity from volatile spot markets, financial penalties, and reputational damage associated with supply shortfalls.
This challenge is only intensifying. Market conditions are shifting rapidly, extreme weather is becoming more common, and customer load patterns are evolving in unprecedented ways. Retailers are often forced to make critical procurement decisions days or weeks ahead, relying on their load forecasts to anticipate market shifts.
The difference between “good enough” and truly accurate forecasting is the difference between reacting to market shocks and proactively seizing opportunities. With clearer visibility and confidence in load, retailers can hedge more strategically, fine-tune their day-ahead versus real-time positions, and make smarter decisions around customer acquisition and retention aligned with anticipated market conditions.
How retailers are leveraging Amperon’s model improvements and services to gain a competitive edge
Across all deregulated markets, Amperon empowers leading retail electricity providers with the forecasting tools to navigate the evolving grid and transform portfolio risk management from a cost center into a strategic advantage. Through a combination of market expertise, constant data science model improvements, and enhanced data ingestion pipelines, Amperon has helped retailers benefit from accurate forecasts in two main areas:.
1. Future-Proof Forecasting Models
- Granular customer insights: Amperon extracts, cleans, and trains on residential and C&I customer metadata from EDI data feeds to expand model training variables. This has significantly improved the forecast accuracy for retailers entering new load zones and serving diverse load customers.
- Continuously improving forecasts: Each forecast leverages historical load patterns and improvements from prior model performance across tens of millions of anonymized meters. This means your forecast benefits from the cumulative intelligence and scope of our database to deliver greater accuracy and adaptability.
- Solving data lag: While retailers have historically struggled to forecast in NYISO due to the market-specific lags in publishing load actuals, Amperon has engineered an approach that uses estimated actuals to fill in data lags. This methodology has unlocked improved forecasting logic and prediction accuracy.
2. Full-Service Support
- Dedicated markets and customer success teams: Amperon customers get access not just to industry-leading forecasting accuracy, but to a team of market and technical experts that monitor ISO changes that impact retail suppliers. Despite unpredictable changes and updates to data feeds from the ISO, our team minimizes disruption to forecasts, keeping our customers’ success as the core of our operations.
- Scheduling services: Amperon’s Portfolio Scheduling service streamlines operations for retailers, allowing you to effortlessly link our industry-leading forecast to an end-to-end day-ahead bid submission to the ISO. Submit bids for your entire portfolio with our secure and flexible process to ensure smooth operations while minimizing the risk of human error.
Model accuracy results from our customers
Our advanced modeling and dedicated support teams are driving measurable success for retail electricity providers across deregulated markets. These results showcase how our forecasts consistently achieve industry-leading accuracy — even in some of the most challenging forecasting markets like NYISO and ERCOT.
Dedication to continued improvements
At Amperon, our commitment to your success is rooted in our drive for continuous improvement. We’re dedicated to constantly refining our models, integrating new data sources, and staying ahead of evolving market dynamics. As retail electricity markets become more complex, the adoption of behind-the-meter storage accelerates, and your customer needs shift, we’re committed to evolving our forecasting capabilities to meet your challenges.
Ready to turn forecasting into your growth engine? Contact Amperon today and see how you can unlock new growth in your retail portfolio.
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