How to Get the Most Out of Ask ArkSight

Ask ArkSight is built to answer hard questions about European energy markets — but how you ask matters as much as what you ask. ArkSight has direct access to a live database of electricity prices, generation by technology, load, cross-border flows, balancing volumes, and more, plus the ability to search the web for current regulatory developments, market news, and TSO announcements. Like any analyst, it performs best when it has clear context, a defined scope, and a specific question. Here's how to get consistently useful results.

Specify the market and time range upfront

ArkSight covers dozens of bidding zones across Europe, from SE3 and FI to DE-LU, FR, and ES. Without a geographic anchor, it has to guess — and guessing introduces ambiguity into every subsequent step of the analysis. Naming the zone, country, or region you care about at the start of your question gets you to a precise answer faster.

Time range matters for the same reason. "What happened to prices last winter?" could mean last week, last year, or a decade ago. "What happened to SE3 day-ahead prices in Q4 2024?" leaves no room for interpretation. For trend questions, specifying a comparison period is even more useful: "How did Nordic FCR-N procurement volumes in 2024 compare to 2023?" gives ArkSight a clear analytical target.

Ask for data, not just explanations

ArkSight's core differentiator over a general-purpose AI is that it can query structured, verified market data — electricity prices, generation mix, load profiles, imbalance volumes, and balancing costs — directly from TSO and market operator sources. A question like "why were German prices high in January?" will produce a better answer if you ask ArkSight to pull the underlying data first: "Show me German day-ahead prices and wind generation for January 2025, then explain what drove the pattern." This forces the analysis to be grounded in numbers rather than general reasoning.

The same principle applies to balancing and ancillary market questions. Rather than asking "Is the Nordic aFRR market expensive?", try "Show me Nordic aFRR capacity prices for 2024 and compare them to 2023." You get a concrete, data-backed answer instead of a qualitative overview.

Ask for charts and exports when you need them

ArkSight defaults to rendering interactive visualizations for time-series and comparative questions, but you can also request them explicitly. Phrases like "show me a chart of..." or "plot this as a stacked bar by technology" will produce a visual rather than a table. If you need to take the data into your own tools, ask ArkSight to export to Excel — it can package query results into a spreadsheet ready for download.

For dense numerical comparisons — say, day-ahead prices across eight bidding zones for every month of 2024 — a table is often more useful than a chart, and you can ask for that explicitly too. Matching the output format to your intended use is as important as the query itself.

Break complex analyses into steps

Energy market questions often have multiple moving parts: a price observation, a supply-side explanation, a cross-border flow component, and a regulatory backstory. Trying to get all of that in one shot can produce a broad but shallow response. Working through it in sequence — first understand what happened to prices, then ask what drove generation, then explore how interconnectors behaved — gives ArkSight a chance to go deep on each layer and lets you steer the analysis based on what you find.

This is especially effective for multi-market comparisons. Start with one zone to establish a baseline, then ask ArkSight to repeat the analysis for a second zone and identify the differences. The conversation builds on itself, and the conclusions are better for it.

Use the conversation to iterate

ArkSight is built for dialogue, not one-shot queries. If a chart isn't quite right — wrong granularity, too many zones cluttering the view, a time range that cuts off a key event — just say so. "Change the resolution to weekly," "remove DE-LU and add PL," or "extend the date range back to 2022" are all instructions ArkSight can act on immediately, without you needing to repeat the original question.

The same goes for depth and format. If you want a more technical explanation of an imbalance settlement mechanism, ask for it. If you want a shorter summary you can drop into a report, say so. ArkSight adjusts to your needs rather than producing a one-size-fits-all response.

Give ArkSight relevant context

Context about your role or objective helps ArkSight frame its answers appropriately. A portfolio manager running a battery storage asset in the Nordic market has different informational needs than a policy analyst examining capacity mechanism design across continental Europe. Telling ArkSight which lens you're looking through — even briefly — improves the relevance of the analysis without requiring it to cover every possible angle.

If you have specific constraints — a particular technology you're focused on, a market participant you're benchmarking against, or a regulatory deadline driving the question — mentioning them upfront saves back-and-forth and keeps the analysis on what actually matters for your decision.