Five kinds of record and the rules each one needs

In a provincial spot market, a retailer pays for the gap between its day-ahead position and what its customers actually consume, settled at real-time prices. My analytics team forecasts customer load for each trading interval and describes the range around that forecast, not only a single line. We separate errors caused by late meter data, by customers' production changes and by weather, because each has a different remedy. The head of trading decides the position and the risk limit; my team does not adjust a forecast to suit a preferred outcome, and traders record their reasons when they set it aside. Each month I review the cost of forecast error by customer group and time of day, since a modest error in an expensive evening interval can matter more than a larger one at midday. That review directs our next analytical effort.

Our commercial customers' interval consumption reaches us through the grid company's metering service under each customer's authorisation and, at 44 large sites, through gateways reading their own sub-meters. Those readings reveal production schedules and occasionally a factory in difficulty. I treat them as the customer's commercially confidential information. Each authorisation states the purposes: forecasting, settlement checks and the customer's own energy reports. Sales colleagues may not use a consumption pattern to approach that customer's competitors or suppliers, and the data are deleted on an agreed date after a contract ends. When a customer moves to another retailer, we confirm in writing what we hold and when it will be removed. These terms cost us some analytical freedom. They also make customers more willing to share the detailed readings that improve forecasts across the whole portfolio.

A charging session links a phone number, sometimes a plate number, a station and a time. Over months, those records describe where a person goes, and Chinese personal-information law treats a person's whereabouts as sensitive. My office works with legal colleagues to keep collection to what billing, safety and dispute handling require. Plate numbers used for parking-fee waivers are deleted after thirty days. Identifiable session records are kept for twenty-four months, which covers our finance and complaint processes, and older records are aggregated. Any proposal to provide drivers' personal information to another organisation needs their separate consent and an impact assessment before it reaches a commercial negotiation. I report the number of identifiable records we hold to the risk committee each quarter, because a falling figure is the evidence that our retention rules are working in practice.

Chargers report their own condition: insulation-monitoring results, connector temperatures, current reductions when a contact runs hot, and fault codes from three manufacturers using different conventions. Our maintenance contractor records what its technicians did. Until 2025 those two records were reviewed separately. My governance team now maps the fault codes to one shared vocabulary and links every repeated alarm to the work order that closed it. A work order closed as a reset, with the same alarm returning within a week, appears on the safety manager's list the next morning. Decisions to lock out a connector or limit its current belong to the safety manager and the general manager. My office supplies the evidence and its gaps, including connectors whose telemetry is too incomplete to support any conclusion; those are listed for inspection in their own right.

Almost ten years at a coal-fired plant taught me how an emissions figure is assembled: coal received, coal burned, sampling, laboratory analysis and continuous monitoring, each with its own errors. Today our customers ask for consumption and green-electricity records to support their own emissions reporting, and some operate in industries that China's national carbon market is extending to. I keep those statements narrow. We report the electricity supplied, the green-electricity certificates actually matched to that customer, and the published grid emission factor the customer chooses to apply. We do not issue a lower emissions figure than the records support, even when a competing retailer's statement looks more flattering. A customer's verifier should be able to trace every number we provide back to a settlement record or a certificate, without needing to ask us what we meant.