Infant online trading system Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)continues to rack up impressive results, posting over 95 Bcf ofphysical gas trading, along with almost 970 Bcf of financial gastrading and 40 million MWh of power dealing in its first six and ahalf weeks of commercial operation.

In comparison, 240 Bcf of combined physical and financial gastrades were done and six million MWh were transacted in the firstweek of trading on the ICE.

“This is extremely rapid growth from our perspective in a veryshort period of time,” said Janine McArdle, president of thesponsoring energy consortium which includes: American ElectricPower; Aquila Energy; Duke Energy; El Paso Energy; Reliant Energy;and Southern Company Energy Marketing.

“There are currently right now over 4,000 physical and financialnatural gas and power products available for trading on thesystem,” said McArdle.

“One of the critical success factors with any system is itsability to provide all industry participants access to trading inboth the short-term and long-term market product. Most recentlywith the price volatility and weather patterns that we have beenexperiencing, access to these various markets has been invaluable.We’ve seen that as evidenced by a rapid growth in both the dailyand near term traded markets both for power and for gas.”

The exchange has expanded its user-base at a wildfire’s pace aswell. Starting six weeks ago with only the partner companies makingenergy transactions, the system has now grown to 90 differentparticipants including marketers, producers, utilities and endusers.

McArdle also said that the electronic back office was nearingcompletion. Not only have the original partner firms started toutilize the electronic link between their systems and the ICEsystem to gather and process their companies trading activities,but non-partner firms also have begun to show interest inelectronically linking their systems to ICE to gather similarinformation, said McArdle.

“From our perspective, we expect to continue to see an increasein the volume of energy traded on the system,”

The six energy powerhouses formed the Energy Trading PlatformHolding Company (ETPHCo.) in April in an effort to create anindependent power and gas trading exchange (see Daily GPI, April 14). Instead of building their own,the company purchased an interest in Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange in July (see Daily GPI, July27). The ICE exchange initially was launched in March with backingfrom BP Amoco, Royal Dutch Shell Group, Societie Generale InvestmentBanking, Totalfina Elf Group, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and MorganStanley Dean Witter.

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