There was a day this year when MISO issued an Energy Emergency Alert, level 1 and 2, and real-time pricing went, in George Lamartiniere’s words, “very, very crazy.” For most generators, that kind of day gets diagnosed after the fact: Settlement data lands, and only then do you learn how your units actually performed while prices spiked.Â
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For Cleco Power, it didn’t work that way. George Lamartiniere, Market Operations Strategist at Cleco, could open PCI Insights and watch it update hour by hour, live, while the event was still happening. The same holds in reverse: If a storm rolls through and a unit trips offline, Cleco can see the impact on its P&L as it unfolds, rather than waiting for next-day settlement data to explain what happened.Â
George Lamartiniere on how PCI Insights improves settlement accuracy on startup charges compared to Cleco’s previous QlikView-based system, from a recent PCI Energy Solutions webinar, which is available to view upon request.
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That gap, between finding out during the event and finding out after it, is the real story behind Cleco’s move to PCI Insights.Â
A regulated utility running a real fleet in MISOÂ
Cleco Power service territory map, provided by Cleco.Â
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Cleco Power is a regulated electric utility headquartered in Pineville, Louisiana, operating eight generating units across five facilities for a rated capacity of roughly 2,676 megawatts (MW). The company entered the MISO market in December 2013, and for years ran its P&L and settlement analytics on a QlikView-based system: PCI’s GenManager platform for front- and back-office bid-to-bill operations, paired with a P&L Analyzer and Settlement Analyzer running on QlikView.Â
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That system worked, but it had a structural limit. “With QlikView, everything had to be manually exported, so it made it difficult to automate any of our processes,” said Cody Caraway, Cleco’s Principal FTR Specialist in the recent PCI Insights webinar.Â
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Cleco is now in the process of replacing that QlikView layer with PCI Insights, adding a data warehouse to store Cleco’s market and operational data and building BI analytics reporting on top of it. The project is currently in parallel operations, with go-live targeted for November 2026.Â
What changes when data moves at market speedÂ
The clearest example of what that shift buys Cleco is the real-time Profit-and-Loss Analysis (PLA) function: It pulls in real-time market awards, meter data, and operational data (like commitment mode) every five minutes, with the day-ahead and real-time P&L view refreshing hourly.Â
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That’s the functionality that was live the day of the EEA event. It’s also what lets Cleco’s team catch smaller problems while there’s still time to fix them. If a unit isn’t following its dispatch instruction, Cleco can see that in real time, adjust the unit’s offer, and resubmit it to MISO, before a deficient-dispatch penalty is ever assessed, rather than reconstructing what went wrong once settlement data comes in.Â
“If we see that a unit is having some issues following the dispatch, we can make the necessary corrections in real time before we get several penalties for the day for a deficient dispatch,” Lamartiniere said. “And so we can make adjustments to our offer and submit that to MISO to get the unit into a parameter that it can follow.”Â
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The accuracy gains show up in quieter ways too. Lamartiniere pointed to how Cleco’s units get treated around startup charges: “We’ve noticed Insights calculates better when you have units that get hit with startup charges based on where they’ve been on or around that midnight time frame.” Under the old QlikView setup, a unit that was already online and self-scheduled could still get hit with a startup charge that night, a charge that would typically only clear once the final S7 settlement statement arrived. PCI Insights recognizes the unit was already on and doesn’t generate that charge in the first place. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of accuracy gain that adds up across a portfolio of eight units.Â
George Lamartiniere, Market Operations Strategist at Cleco, on watching a MISO Energy Emergency Alert unfold in real time with PCI Insights.
Built for more than one teamÂ
Part of what makes this useful across Cleco isn’t just the real-time function — it’s that the same platform now serves teams that used to work from separate exports and manual reports. PCI Insights is used across Cleco’s front office, back office, corporate analytics, regulatory, and asset management functions. As Lamartiniere put it, the shared data mart gives the whole organization “centralized data… allowing us some options when it comes to reporting,” rather than each group pulling its own separate exports.Â
PCI webinar: ‘Inside Cleco’s Playbook’Â
On Sept. 10, 2026, Cody Carraway and George Lamartiniere led a webinar alongside PCI. You can find the following in the full webinar: Â
- Ha Tran walks through the platform’s underlying architectureÂ
- Cody Caraway demos the Power Query-based custom reporting Cleco has built on top of the data martÂ
- The team fields live questions on deployment cost and timeline Â
Request the full webinar recording to see the complete PCI Insights dashboard demo and hear the Q&A in full.
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Learn more about PCI Insights here and discover how you can bring data together in one intuitive tool, empowering you with the ease of use and flexibility of a modern cloud-based solution.
