Headquartered in Houston Texas, Reliant Energy provides electricity, natural gas and energy services to retail and wholesale customers in the United States, Latin America and Western Europe. The company has nearly 27,000 megawatts of power generation in the United States and Western Europe and provides energy to more than 4 million customers in the United States alone. Reliant Energy's Wholesale Group handles the operation of the company's many power plants. The group manages power generation, wholesale energy trading and marketing, and natural gas pipeline operations. Reliant Energy's wholesale group gathers and stores historical and forecasted information from its generation assets, customer usage records, subscription databases and other sources.
Stored information includes electric load data, weather data, and electric and gas price data.
The wholesale group uses SAS to model and analyze this data, regardless of its location. They can just point and click on their browser and get the information they need. With SAS installed on a central server platform, Olsen has developed a variety of thin-client applications that let business users easily access and process data through the company intranet. Plant operators, power traders, energy buyers and sellers, and generation managers use the Web applications to forecast prices, predict weather changes and determine electric loads. Users in the wholesale group are now approaching him to develop customized screens that will help them save time and automate analyses that they compute everyday.