The national energy and climate plans – NECPs, developed by the Member States of the European Union, for the period 2021-30, reveal a growing share of time-variable renewable sources (e.g. wind and photovoltaic) in the energy mix of most European countries, assuming a role of the utmost importance in the sustainability of future power generation systems. In this context, the topic “electricity markets” is currently under discussion by researchers, regulators, policy makers and stakeholders. Recently, in view of the electricity prices in those markets, this topic has become even more relevant, what constitutes a critical issue, in the current phase of energy transition, for the evolution of society and the economies on which it is based.
In February 2020, the project TradeRES – New Markets Design and Models for ~100% Renewable Power Systems, started, (https://traderes.eu). This project is funded by the Horizonte 2020 program and coordinated by LNEG -Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia , IP, and aims to develop and test innovative architectures for electricity markets, which are able to meet the needs of society with a view to an electrical system that tends to be 100% renewable, maintaining the current technical robustness and ensuring its economic sustainability.
Within the scope of the project, essential guidelines for changing electricity markets have already been defined. In a first phase, these must go through increasing the dynamism of the markets, allowing, among other changes, the negotiation to occur as close as possible to the time of supply, and allowing the transaction of energy ramps for short periods and on a continuous basis. These measures are in line with the characteristics of time-varying renewable sources, which are rapidly growing in Europe, such as wind and solar photovoltaic energy. On the other hand, there is a need to introduce new actors and market designs capable of boosting flexibility and energy storage mechanisms, in order to guarantee the robustness and security of supply of the electrical system. In this way, the active management of consumers, encouraging the electrification of society, and the integration of the various energy sectors (e.g. heating/cooling, green hydrogen production, transportation sector, among others) will be essential to guarantee security of supply.
Two years after starting, and through its Advisory Board, the project counts with the involvement of several entities of the business sector linked to energy, whose contributions have been crucial for the development of new market designs.
Some examples of the objectives already achieved were; the definition of the database management platform; the integration of the different market models; and the identification of alternative market designs to the existing ones. This platform is the Spine Toolbox, and was also developed with European funding (Horizon 2020), being open-access and available on GitHub.
Within the consortium, six modeling systems were identified with different market models to be integrated: two based on the optimization of power generation systems and their respective energy dispatches; and four based on artificial intelligence technology with computational agents. These last systems seek to represent the various market agents as computational agents, trying to simulate real environments of market participation.
In order to integrate the different models, an ontology was defined for the database, common to all systems. In this way, all models can access the database through the Spine Toolbox, and the input database contains all the essential information to carry out the simulations. The provisional version of the already developed database, with the foreseen scenarios, is publicly available on the project website (https://traderes.eu/).
The first online workshop organized by the project, took place in October 2021, with the participation of 5 internationally renowned speakers. (presentations available at https://traderes.eu/events/). This workshop counted with 200 participants, who actively contributed for the discussion of the topics covered, such as; adequacy of the power generation system to the electricity markets, wholesale market, distributed generation, and integration of the various energy sectors.
Other dissemination actions took place in 2021, such as the publication of scientific papers and participation in conferences, including the ENTSO-E event (European association for the cooperation of transmission system operators (TSOs) for electricity (https:// www.entsoe.eu/). This participation originated a series of meetings to establish synergies with other projects in the area of the integration of renewable energy systems in the electricity production system.
The work on the project will continue until 2024, and the results will provide guidelines on the best options for the development of new designs for electricity markets in Europe as we move towards (almost) 100% renewable power systems, being this, major contribution to the achievement of European energy and climate targets.
Consortium: LNEG, Portugal (Coordinator); TU Delft, Netherlands; VTT, Finland; TNO, Netherlands; ISEP, Portugal; Imperial College London, United Kingdon; DLR, Germany; BITYOGA, Norway; SMARTWATT, Portugal; ENBW, Germany.
