ETPA's Energy Trading Platform, Built on Event Sourcing

Introduction

The energy market has become more complex over the last decade as new, smaller players, mostly solar and wind, have joined it. ETPA (Energy Trading Platform Amsterdam) built its platform for short-term electricity trading: participants sell surplus power or buy power to cover a shortfall, and ETPA handles both delivery and payments. Major energy companies use it, and so do smaller ones such as greenhouses and waste processors.

"We have used Axon Framework and Axon Server for many years as the basis for our energy trading platform infrastructure."

- Jorrit Nijholt, Chief Technology Officer at ETPA

The Challenge: A Trading Platform Regulators Can Inspect Any Day

ETPA needed an energy trading platform that met Dutch and European regulatory requirements, could scale without losing reliability, and could expand across Europe as new business models emerged.

1. Compliance on Demand

   Regulators such as the Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM) and the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) can inspect at any time. They need to know what happened, when, and by whom, to prevent or investigate market manipulation.

   
   

2. Scalability Across Europe

   Expanding beyond the Netherlands meant handling unpredictable, high-frequency trading from a growing mix of participants, from horticulture and waste disposal to aluminum smelters, batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines.

   
   

3. Reliability Around the Clock

   Energy trading runs 24/7, 365 days a year, and downtime is not an option.

The Solution: An Event-Sourced Energy Trading Platform

With event sourcing, each change built on Axon Framework and Axon Server is stored as an event in the order it happened, so the answer to a regulator’s “what happened, when, and by whom” is already in the record.

See how the same approach supports payments processing for systems where every action has to be accounted for.