Development of a Web based Electricity Market Simulator

Exhibitor: Mark Sorbello

Supervisor: Zhao Dong

Research Group: Complex and Intelligent Systems

Industry Sector: Energy and Utilities

The current electricity market as run by the National Electricity Market Management Company Limited (NEMMCO) uses a very complicated infrastructure, even though the goals seem so simple, that is, buying and selling electricity. The question needs to be asked, “Could these goals of buying and selling electricity be achieved under a different infrastructure, and if so, could this new infrastructure offer additional benefits?” With this question in mind, the purpose of this thesis is to simulate a portion of the electricity market, via the use of a web-based auction procedure. Ideally, this will demonstrate the potential positive gains that could be achieved when compared against the current NEMMCO infrastructure.

This auction procedure is comprised of electricity sellers that place units of electricity onto the auction market, while electricity buyers (bidders) bid for these units. Units of electricity will be sold to the highest bidder. From the seller’s perspective, units of electricity have to be sold at the highest possible price, whilst trying to minimise unsold units. From a buyer’s perspective units of electricity need to be purchased as cheap as possible from various sellers.

It is unrealistic to assume that the bidder will monitor the auction for the entire duration of the auction. Therefore, an intelligent bidder is needed to place intelligent bids on behalf of the buyer. This thesis builds upon this basic concept and extends the scope of this project to perform automated bids in auctions relating to the electricity market.

The whole auction procedure is controlled by administrators, who are responsible for maintaining data, such as the addition and removal of buyers and/or sellers in the system. Furthermore, administrators are able to and responsible for, continuously monitoring the market’s current state (eg power flow at a specific time) and accordingly respond to crucial system events such as blackouts.

There are two very important issues that will be considered during the execution of this simulation being; the electrical loss associated in transporting electricity and the maximum interconnection capacity of electricity paths.

The project was broken down into administrative, buyer and seller modules and was built upon three-tier software architecture. The implemented web server is apache, which uses PHP 4.2 as the server-side scripting language to produce web pages, and MySQL 3.23 as the database management system to store relevant information.

The final system was tested using sample scenarios/situations and results were correlated and compared against the existing electricity power system as run by NEMMCO. From this, it was shown that this simulation demonstrated the potential positive gains to be had in promoting a more competitive, dynamic and streamlined electricity market.

Thesis Document (PDF)

Other Related Files