Energy procurement

In the EU a business can buy electricity from any supplier it chooses. Article 4 of Directive 2019/944 guarantees that freedom, and in Poland Article 4j of the Energy Law (Prawo energetyczne) gives every customer the right to buy energy from the seller of its choice. The network stays with the local distribution operator, so procurement is about the energy itself. Under Article 5 of the Energy Law the buyer signs either a sales contract plus a separate distribution contract, or one comprehensive contract that covers both. A sales contract has to state at least the delivery point, the volume for each contract period and the price or tariff group.

A small company usually fixes one price for a year or two. A buyer spending hundreds of thousands of euros a year on energy has more options. With a fixed price the whole volume is priced at signing. In tranche purchasing the contract fixes the rules, and the buyer fixes the price of parts of the volume over time: each tranche is priced at the forward quotation of a product, such as the calendar-year baseload, on the day it is bought, or at the average quotation over an agreed period. Whatever is still open at delivery is settled at a spot or index price. Part of the volume can come from a PPA. To pick the supplier, the buyer or its adviser runs a tender: suppliers quote against the same specification, and the offers are compared line by line.

A procurement platform has to answer three questions every day: how much is already bought and at what price, what the rest would cost today, and whether the invoices match the contracts. That requires:

• A position for every contract: expected volume, purchased volume and open volume, by product and delivery period. Users enter tranches in MW, MWh or as a percentage, so the system needs one internal unit, explicit conversion and a record of what the user typed.
• A simulated price, recalculated every day: purchased tranches at their prices plus the open volume at current forward prices.
• Tranche types beyond a single date, such as a tranche priced at the average of a product over a period, whose value changes daily until the period ends.
• A budget price with validity dates and a change history. Calculations use the latest value, and the history keeps every earlier value for an audit.
• Daily imports of market data from several sources, with public holidays, time zones and missing quotations handled.
• A record of each decision: who recommended a purchase, on what grounds, who approved it and when.
• Tenders in one offer structure, so different suppliers' prices, volumes and terms can be compared.
• Invoice control: a shadow invoice calculated from the contract, the meter data and the distribution tariff, compared with the supplier's and the operator's invoices. Charges such as the capacity fee belong in it.
• Guarantees of origin bought with or alongside the energy, tracked for emissions reporting.

Since 2020 we have built Enerace.Online for Enerace, an advisory that helps companies buy electricity and gas. The platform calculates each client's portfolio position from the contracts entered, which replaced spreadsheet calculations, and computes a simulated price for every contract from past purchases and the current market. Tranche purchases in MW came in 2021, and in 2022 we added MWh; the system converts both to a percentage of the contract volume. Also in 2022 we built tranches priced at the average quotation of a chosen product over a date range, for example 50% of the volume at the average price of the 2023 calendar-year baseload contract (BASE_Y-23 on TGE) between January 14 and October 30, 2022. The platform updates that average every day until the end date and ignores purchases entered before the averaging period. Later in 2022 budget prices got validity dates and a change history, and calculations always take the latest value.

Consultants issue purchase recommendations with a rationale, the client accepts them in the platform, and each decision stays in the history. The tender module, built in three stages in 2024 and extended between September 2025 and January 2026, lets users review and compare supplier offers. Invoice control started in 2023 with a shadow invoice model and CSV imports of invoice and distribution operator data that the system compares with each other. Distribution costs were added in 2024 and invoice control reports in 2025.