If you’re planning to participate for the first time or enter a new market, it’s imperative to optimize your data and analytics strategy.
The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) in Ontario provides a great example. IESO went nodal May 1, 2025, with a financially binding day-ahead physical market that went from one ISO-wide price to nearly 1,000 price nodes.
Having the right trading strategy is great, but it’s only possible with the right data. See what items you should check off your list to ensure the effectiveness of your plan.
First up on the checklist of data and analytics best practices is data sourcing. Data timeliness and freshness are essential, with 15+ new reports and 12+ updated reports from IESO, some of which are now reported every five minutes, such as their nodal real-time locational marginal prices (LMPs).
Next up is data quality monitoring. Bad data can be disastrous. Watch for things like missing or invalid data, data source changes, and broken feeds.
Even after you collect correct data, it might still be revised by the ISO. Storing the full change history by capturing all row-level data changes is a best practice.
Source: Yes Energy
Another key to working efficiently with complex data is data normalization. Since you probably already trade in and have data for other markets, standardized data helps with scaling your strategies in new markets, such as IESO.
Well-established data access and governance protocols are critical to maintain trust and accountability in data and analytics processes. Role-based access to critical data that reflects downstream use cases—from real-time traders to quants to risk, compliance, and legal professionals—is a foundational component of an effective governance model.
Ongoing platform reliability is essential. Your data and analytics platform needs to be available, redundant, and resilient—especially in real-time power markets, where even a short outage can have major financial consequences.
Given the current pace of innovation in technology, data, and power markets, the status quo will only last you so long. To maintain their edge, the most effective organizations are regularly preparing for future enhancements and upskilling their teams for all of these data and analytics best practices.
This is part of RTO Insider’s special edition for power traders. Want to learn more?
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