Energy markets in Europe face growing uncertainty. Market liberalisation brings a major change, since it implies the creation of market mechanisms where previously there were public monopolies. At the same time, the price of crude oil is rising sharply. This communication explores how energy price uncertainty is managed by energy market actors (suppliers, banks and leading industrial consumers). An in-depth analysis of purchasing practices shows that price uncertainty has become the main issue for industrial energy consumers. This communication focuses on the way energy purchasers accumulate market information, understand market organisation, make sense of price variations, define their purchasing strategies and defend them before their top managers.
I will consider purchasers' calculation and decision practices as “sensemaking” activity (Weick, 1993). According to this framework, I question how energy purchasers make sense of and rebuild coherence with incoherent or ambiguous market signals, with incoherent purchasing and budgeting rules. More precisely, this framework helps me to characterise purchasing practices as rebuilding bridges between the energy trading world, where uncertainty is the norm, and the industrial world which is based on planning and budgeting procedures.