Germany power market resorts to algorithm trading

Frankfurt

GERMANY'S shift to renewable energy has created a power market so volatile that humans are having trouble keeping up with it.

Four-year-old Grundgruen Energie GmbH, whose glass-walled office is just off Berlin's most fashionable shopping street, uses a coping technique more likely found in markets for stocks, bonds and currencies: It lets a computer program do the hard stuff. About nine other trading firms are doing the same in the German market, most starting just last year, according to an estimate by the Epex Spot SE exchange in Paris.