Leveraging data to optimize trading, risk management, operational and business strategy in midst of market disruption and restructuring

This is a ZE Global Tech Summit Recap Blog.

Sid Dash’s keynote presentation focused on the proliferation of data and the challenge of leveraging that data effectively.

The energy sector is experiencing rapid change as well as tumultuous events: Covid-19 the growth of renewables, the emergence of LNG, more complex systems of financing, aggressive management of risk and credit profiles, and the digitalization of everything.

In short, the energy market faces a growing diversity of datasets of increasing granularity, Dash said.

Fortunately, the tools to leverage this data already exist. The revolution in computer and consumer hardware has developed components such as graphical processing unit (GPUs), which operate even faster than central processing units.

Many data management tasks, such as running large matrix operations, running a large query over a large database, running a sort operation on a database, running a sort on a large data query, are “very GPU-friendly activities.”

“GPU is good for deep learning, because it’s really good for array-oriented operations.”

Moreover, together with faster processing power, there has been a rapid proliferation of database providers, some of which are specialists in the energy sector.

Dash pointed out that the challenge of more data is actually a “problem of plenty”. “There are so many different types of data frameworks. In addition, there is so many types of databases out there. The real challenge is focus on which ones you want to use.”

“It’s really important to start thinking your data’s individual types, rather than thinking about the data framework,” Dash said.