Our Energy Market Intelligence Team: Get to know Randy Burns

Direct Energy Business wants to take a quick moment to introduce the newest Market Intelligence Team member, Randy Burns.

Randy graduated from Pennsylvania State University with degrees in Finance and Economics. After graduation, he launched his career at Griffon Energy Capital, LLC, a hedge fund located in Austin, Texas, where he worked as a trading assistant on the Natural Gas and Power Desks. Randy moved back to his hometown of Pittsburgh in January 2009 to work as a consultant for Co-eXprise, a firm focused on procurement solutions. He utilized his wholesale market experience to specialize in the procurement of electricity for large commercial and industrial users.

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Groundhog Day and gas market predictions

Winter 2012-2013 has been virtually nonexistent, just like Manti Te’o’s girlfriend. Pittsburgh Steelers please don’t draft him, let the Browns have him. The lack of winter cold has brought the bears out, pushing the February 2013 prompt contract almost to its all-time low established way back in April 2012. Recently, the market has been bullish because of some colder weather and weaker natural gas storage numbers, including a recent storage report that showed the largest withdrawal in two years! However, longer term market outlook remains overall bearish, but not to the extent of 2012. Consequently, don’t expect natural gas under $2.00 MMBtu anytime soon.

Thus far, this has been a well above normal winter and only sustained below normal temperatures could normalize winter 2012-2013, which brings me to Groundhog Day. I am not talking about waking up and doing the same monotonous thing over and over again like Bill Murray. Fortunately, I don’t have those types of Groundhog days because I get to work with the gregarious and fun Mike Krygowski [a fellow blogger].

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Are you ready for some ‘green’ football?

Although the Pittsburgh Steelers failed to reach playoffs this year (I’m very torn up about this, but am also pumped that the NHL finally started its season), I was reading an article about the The Big Game going ‘green’. Did you know the NFL has an environmental program that has been around for 18 years? Last year, they set out to have the greenest game ever.

  1. Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, is an environmentally-friendly stadium. Since the stadium has a retractable roof, their CPI lighting system utilizes natural light. Each year, the stadium recycles tons of aluminum, plastic, glass and cardboard.
  2. Two charging stations for electric cars were available.
  3. The hotel that housed the Media Center, JW Marriott, took food scraps to be turned into compost.
  4. The lights shining down on the field were powered by green energy.
  5. For the past seven years, the NFL has planted 1,000 trees in each host city.

Information derived from the ecorazzi blog and Super Bowl XLVII: Playing offense on clean energy and Super Bowl XLVI: Greening efforts to reduce environmental impact

 

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