V

Last night, I tested our new system for real-time surveillance and messaging 
of the weather, and it delivers the data to desktops throughout the building 
more than 6 1/2 minutes before the National Weather Service updates their 
webpages. Our current technology was web-scraping these pages via ftp, then 
parsing into a database. The impact of these 6 1/2 minutes for the hourly 
power traders is enormous- the weather stations upload their data around 53 
minutes after the hour, and we can now receive them within 2 minutes later. 
We can now re-estimate our nonlinear stack model before the top of the hour, 
when hourly power trading begins. Otherwise, we would not have model results 
until around 15 minutes after the hour. Notably, hourly power trading is, for 
all intents and purposes, concluded by then (they trade for 10-15 minutes and 
manage the scheduling for the next 30 or so miutes). So, effectively, we may 
now be one *hour* ahead of where we were just a few days ago, in terms of 
information. People are very excited up here, from the CTO on down- thanks 
for letting it happen.

C