SAS/IntrNet® Gives Reliant Energy Instant Access to Information

Providing high quality products at the right time and in the right amounts concerns production and operation managers in every industry. In the energy industry, these concerns are especially magnified, because power companies supply a product that is consumed the moment it is produced.

Companies that provide energy to millions of consumers cannot simply react to customer demand; they must predict it. Decision makers in the energy industry depend on instant access to reliable information.

In the Reliant Energy Wholesale Group, managers use SAS to get the answers they need via the corporate intranet. According to David Olsen, senior quantitative analyst at Reliant Energy, their SAS/IntrNet solution helps the company serve customer demands reliably and at a low cost.

Headquartered in Houston Texas, Reliant Energy provides electricity, natural gas and energy services to retail and wholesale customers in the United States, Latin America and Western Europe. The company has nearly 27,000 megawatts of power generation in the United States and Western Europe and provides energy to more than 4 million customers in the United States alone.

Reliant Energy's Wholesale Group handles the operation of the company's many power plants. The group manages power generation, wholesale energy trading and marketing, and natural gas pipeline operations.

Customized Data Analyses Via the Web
SAS/IntrNet software is a suite of CGI and Java tools that let developers create and deploy Web-enabled reports and applications. Reliant Energy uses SAS/IntrNet to extend SAS' powerful data retrieval and analysis functionality to the Web.

Olsen has used SAS/IntrNet to develop a series of applications that provide remote access to his company's data and bring the computing power of SAS software to the desktops of more than 50 employees in the Wholesale Group.

Reliant Energy's wholesale group gathers and stores historical and forecasted information from its generation assets, customer usage records, subscription databases and other sources. Stored information includes electric load data, weather data, and electric and gas price data. The wholesale group uses SAS to model and analyze this data, regardless of its location.

"We can keep our data in Oracle or Sybase databases and we don't have to worry about the individual user having SAS or having any SAS training," says Olsen. "They can just point and click on their browser and get the information they need."

With SAS installed on a central server platform, Olsen has developed a variety of thin-client applications that let business users easily access and process data through the company intranet. Plant operators, power traders, energy buyers and sellers, and generation managers use the Web applications to forecast prices, predict weather changes and determine electric loads.

According to Olsen, SAS/IntrNet has helped him give decision makers access to accurate and useful information. Users in the wholesale group are now approaching him to develop customized screens that will help them save time and automate analyses that they compute everyday. "We've become more user driven," explains Olsen, "More people now have the opportunity to learn and become familiar with the business in general."

Olsen expects the popularity of SAS/IntrNet to continue at Reliant Energy. Recent state legislation will open the Texas electricity marketplace to full retail competition by the year 2002. In the long run, Olsen feels that giving employees access to data through SAS/IntrNet-developed applications will help keep the company profitable in this newly competitive marketplace.

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