In the late 1980s, as an oceanographic researcher for the U.S. Navy, Anil Suri probed the Atlantic Ocean to predict changes in the weather-influencing flows of the Gulf Stream. Today he’s tracking much different but no less critical currents. Suri, who earned a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard and an MBA from Columbia, drew on his interdisciplinary skills to create E-lecTrade, an anonymous online electricity marketplace. The Tarrytown, New York, company recently began a live market test after more than a year of development; it’s an upstart in a business dominated by EnronOnline, where $330 billion in energy and other commodities was traded last year. Unlike the Enron site, E-lecTrade homes in on a subset of highly complex, structured transactions that require an extra dimension in portfolio and risk management. “We’ll give up standard trades” to Enron and other liquid markets, says CEO Suri, 40. “But when it comes to portfolio management, our customers wouldn’t want to share their information with Enron - it’s a competitor.” Customized trades can be ten times as costly as commoditized ones, but Suri says that his technology can level out the difference. Backed by Nth Power Technologies, an energy-oriented venture capital firm, and Israel’s Shalom Equity Fund, E-lecTrade signed up 17 companies for its ongoing beta test. Several of them operate in a grid of eastern states that has made savvy use of spot trading to avoid California-type power shortfalls. “I’ve consulted to hedge funds and banks on risk management,” says Suri, who spent most of the 1990s advising energy and financial corporations. “These guys need the same set of tools.”
