TAIPEI, Jan. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Star Trade, an international energy services provider under the HDRE Group, today announced an official partnership with Japan's leading electricity retailer, Chubu Electric Power Miraiz (Chubu Miraiz), to initiate an energy storage collaboration that includes examining an expansion of capacity up to 300 MW, aimed at enhancing peak-hour electricity price stability. The project introduces an insurance-based hedging solution backed by large-scale battery storage, marking Star Trade's first overseas deployment of this product and its entry into the core of Japan's energy market.
Chubu Miraiz, Retail Electricity and Gas Supply Company of Chubu Electric Power Group (9502.JP), ranks among Japan's top three electricity retailers and supplies power to customers across mainly central Japan. The region is home to Japan's automotive and heavy manufacturing base, with a dense concentration of production and export-oriented enterprises. As a result, it is one of the country's most electricity-intensive and price-sensitive areas.
Chubu Miraiz procures a portion of its electricity from the JEPX spot market. As price volatility is particularly pronounced during evening peak periods, the need for effective price hedging solutions has been increasing. To address this challenge, Star Trade will provide a storage-backed peak price hedging solution, and is exploring an expansion of storage capacity up to 300 MW as part of this initiative.
The solution integrates real-time charge/discharge control with AI-powered price forecasting, enabling targeted hedging operations during periods of anticipated price spikes. By doing so, it allows Chubu Miraiz to mitigate spot market procurement, among other exposures, while allowing Star Trade to partially stabilize returns from its storage assets through structured agreements.
Star Trade is responsible for leading the transaction structure design and strategy execution, combining HDRE Group's energy storage infrastructure with its proprietary AI pricing models. The offering builds on a proven framework previously implemented by Star Trade in the Australian market and is now being successfully adapted for Japan.
The collaboration represents a key milestone for Star Trade, marking the company's first commercial deployment of an insurance-based energy solution in Japan and its first adoption by a corporate customer. Building on experience from international markets, the project highlights Star Trade's ability to integrate asset operations, pricing intelligence, and trading execution into a unified service framework.
Looking ahead, Star Trade plans to expand its participation in Japan's energy markets and strengthen its presence across the broader Asia-Pacific region. Through its proprietary Star Trade platform, the company aims to deliver scalable, replicable storage solutions that support utilities and enterprises in navigating energy price volatility and ensuring long-term supply stability.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
Star Trade and Chubu Electric Power Miraiz Launch Partnership Toward Up to 300MW of Storage-Backed, Insurance-Based Storage
|
SINGAPORE, Jan. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital travel platform Agoda today announced the open-source release of its API Agent, a universal Model Context Protocol (MCP) server designed to help developers connect MCP clients to GraphQL and REST services using natural language, without building separate integrations for each service.
Operating a large-scale travel platform requires coordinating hundreds of internal services, each with its own schema and interface. While MCP has made it easier to connect language models to external systems, Agoda teams have made it even simpler to manage dozens of services without individual MCP servers for each initiative with its new, open-source API Agent.
API Agent enables developers to configure a target service, ask questions in natural language, and receive structured results. The server automatically inspects schemas, generates the required queries, and executes them without custom integration code or manual mapping.
To support more advanced queries, API Agent includes SQL-based post-processing using DuckDB, enabling sorting, aggregation, and joins even when underlying services do not natively support these operations.
Idan Zalzberg, Chief Technology Officer at Agoda, said, "Many teams want to unlock internal tools for AI, but writing MCPs for each one is a major effort. API Agent takes a novel, zero-effort approach to that transformation, and to our knowledge, is the first of its kind. We've open-sourced it in the hope that others can benefit from the same value we've seen."
The API Agent is available now as open source at github.com/agoda-com/api-agent. API Agent joins Agoda's growing portfolio of open-source projects, including macOS virtualization kubelet, a tool for managing macOS infrastructure at scale.
SINGAPORE, Jan. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital travel platform Agoda today announced the open-source release of its API Agent, a universal Model Context Protocol (MCP) server designed to help developers connect MCP clients to GraphQL and REST services using natural language, without building separate integrations for each service.
Operating a large-scale travel platform requires coordinating hundreds of internal services, each with its own schema and interface. While MCP has made it easier to connect language models to external systems, Agoda teams have made it even simpler to manage dozens of services without individual MCP servers for each initiative with its new, open-source API Agent.
API Agent enables developers to configure a target service, ask questions in natural language, and receive structured results. The server automatically inspects schemas, generates the required queries, and executes them without custom integration code or manual mapping.
To support more advanced queries, API Agent includes SQL-based post-processing using DuckDB, enabling sorting, aggregation, and joins even when underlying services do not natively support these operations.
Idan Zalzberg, Chief Technology Officer at Agoda, said, "Many teams want to unlock internal tools for AI, but writing MCPs for each one is a major effort. API Agent takes a novel, zero-effort approach to that transformation, and to our knowledge, is the first of its kind. We've open-sourced it in the hope that others can benefit from the same value we've seen."
The API Agent is available now as open source at github.com/agoda-com/api-agent. API Agent joins Agoda's growing portfolio of open-source projects, including macOS virtualization kubelet, a tool for managing macOS infrastructure at scale.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
Agoda Launches Open-Source API Agent to Simplify MCP Server Integrations
Agoda Launches Open-Source API Agent to Simplify MCP Server Integrations
