EnronOnline significantly expanded its reach yesterday byforming alliances with HoustonStreet.com and TrueQuote.com, twoenergy trading platforms. Enron signed memorandums of understandingwith both companies to extend EnronOnline pricing for NorthAmerican natural gas and electricity to both.

EnronOnline handles more than 2,000 mainly gas and powertransactions each day and offers buys and sells on more than 800products. It has become the world’s largest e-commerce site interms of commodity value transacted with more than $90 billion intransactions since the beginning of the year.

These two alliances with new trading platforms will give Enroneven greater reach with many more counterparties and will giveEnron’s existing customers an option of trading through platformsother than Enron’s own system.

“Think of this more as a shop front,” said EnronOnline COOLouise Kitchen. “We are putting our goods in more and more shopsthan we were previously, and therefore we expect that somebody whoprefers to transact over HoustonStreet or maybe another platformlike TrueQuote will still be able transact with Enron through that.It’s a customer choice really. We are trying to give our customersas much choice as possible by putting our prices across suchplatforms.

“There will be some more announcements in the future,” she said,referring to negotiations with other trading sites. “We are alwayslooking at more opportunities. I’ve got quite a few phone callstoday.”

Enron plans to simultaneously post prices at which it will buyor sell natural gas and electricity on EnronOnline, True Quote.comand HoustonStreet.com. Customers will be able to transact on any ofthose systems.

Portsmouth, NH-based Houston Street Exchange launchedHoustonStreet.com with an initial power trading platform last fall,and then expanded with a separate bulk power, crude oil and refinedproducts this spring. HoustonStreet also developed commodity andtrading alliances with Conoco, Equiva (the U.S. trading arm forShell, Texaco and Saudi Aramco), Sithe Energies, Inc., Williams andVivendi. It is planning to launch natural gas trading platform inSeptember, at which time the direct EnronOnline connection will bemade. So far HoustonStreet has attracted about 650 registeredtraders from more than 200 companies, a spokeswoman said.

TrueQuote is a newcomer to the e-commerce scene. Conceived byLouisville, KY-based energy broker APB Energy Inc., the platformwill use technology developed by Microsoft Corp. and EnFormTechnology LLC. The system has financial support from PG&ECorp., APB Inc., Microsoft and EnForm. It will be ready to launchin the fall.

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