Almost three months after TradeSpark LP lost half of its staff when the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, the company reported that it has seen steady growth in activity and participants on its electronic energy marketplace for the trading of a variety of energy products. In addition, the company said it saw a “significant jump” when EnronOnline went offline last week.

Electronic commodity exchanges such as TradeSpark, IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) and Dynegydirect have gained significant market share over the past few weeks as EnronOnline has fallen out of favor due to Enron’s financial turmoil, failed merger with Dynegy and subsequent bankruptcy filing (see Daily GPI, Dec. 6).

“We have half the number of staff that we had Sept. 10, but are now doing more business than we were previous to Sept. 11,” said Mike Williams, managing director of TradeSpark. “We were actually seeing an increase in business [since Sept. 11] without the Enron situation…when we were back up Sept. 21.” However, he said there was “clearly a jump in the last week or so since Enron’s demise.” Williams said statistics will be released at the end of the quarter as usual.

TradeSpark, a partnership formed by eSpeed, Inc., Cantor Fitzgerald and five of the largest energy producers/distributors, resumed full electronic trading operations for all energy commodities from its back-up offices in New Jersey an amazing 10 days after its main offices in the World Trade Center were destroyed by terrorists. The company vowed that it would continue to offer voice-assisted brokerage of energy products to enhance its electronic marketplace.

“We’ve been tested in the ultimate way,” Williams told NGI. “We wish from the bottom of our hearts that we had not been tested in such a severe manner. But our [goals] were redundancy and robust capability and we have performed as well as anybody could have expected, with e-Speed bringing up TradeSpark inside 10 days (see Daily GPI, Sept. 26). We actually had other products up on e-Speed inside three days. The only reason that it was 10 days for TradeSpark was that we had a request from the government that treasurys should come up rather quickly.”

Going forward, Williams said TradeSpark’s mission has remained the same. “We have been fairly vocal actually about our marketplace [being] a neutral marketplace. A marketplace is all things to all people and does not have a favorite player,” he said. “It has to be multi-lateral…which seems to be the way the marketplace wants to go now.”

On Wednesday, TradeSpark announced the addition of hourly power and balance-of-the-day instruments in all regions to its suite of online products. TradeSpark said it is the first multi-lateral, neutral exchange to offer these products to the market.

Initially, the exchange said it will offer on-peak and off-peak physical hourly power instruments for all 24-hour periods at major interconnects within the West Coast, Midcontinent and South regions. It also will offer on-peak and off-peak financial hourly power, including balance of the day strips, for all 24-hour periods at major interconnects within the East Coast region.

“The addition of hourly power and balance-of-the-day instruments is in direct response to our customers’ need for these products and an excellent addition to the TradeSpark marketplace,” said Williams. “The market is becoming increasingly interested in and dependent on electronic multi-lateral platforms like TradeSpark, and we believe that the addition of these products will be one more reason customers will come to us to execute their trades.”

Currently, Williams said the majority of TradeSpark’s trading in the gas market is financial, but he said the exchange expects to do an increasing amount of physical gas business. Due to customer response, “there is clearly a need for it,” he said.

TradeSpark currently offers a variety of natural gas, electricity, coal and emissions allowances trade types on its system, and is expected to include weather in the future. Williams said that before the events of Sept. 11 they had purchased a small weather broker that was configuring a weather system for a September release on the TradeSpark platform, but that was lost with the World Trade Center.

“We are not going to recreate the New York office in terms of brokering,” Williams said. He added that TradeSpark will continue to have a sales office in New York, but the voice brokering presence is going to be concentrated in Houston.

In addition to eSpeed Inc. and Cantor Fitzgerald, the electronic trading platform’s energy partners are Coral Energy, Dominion, Koch Energy Trading Inc., TXU Energy Trading, and Williams Energy Marketing and Trading Co. Active TradeSpark marketplace participants include Dynegy Inc., Entergy and other major energy traders. The system is open to all participants.

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