Renewables in Electricity Markets

Electricity is nowadays commonly exchanged through electricity markets, designed in a context where dispatchable generators, with non-negligible marginal costs, were dominating. By depending primarily on conventional (fossil, hydro and nuclear) power generation based on marginal pricing, deterministic market designs were considered adequate with straightforward setups consisting of a forward optimal allocation accompanied by a real-time balancing mechanism. However, as the share of renewable sources of energy (RES) increases, such market designs tend to become inefficient since they were not designed to take into account the uncertainty brought by the substantial variability and limited predictability associated with stochastic sources, most notably wind power and solar energy. Due to these developments, the need for decision making models able to account for the uncertainty introduced by high shares of renewable sources and for new market designs has emerged. Consequently, the research vision of our research group focuses on the large scale integration of RES in the power system under a liberalized market environment by providing a set of methods and tools for forecasting power generation from renewables, and on the adaption of electricity market designs and power system operations to the aforementioned characteristics of renewables. Additionally, the aim of the research group is supplemented by providing the appropriate frameworks for secure future investments in the field of renewables being in line with the worldwide environmental concern to reduce carbon emissions and for the economic energy system integration. In this context, the central objective of the group is to deal with the uncertainty in energy systems and to rethink electricity markets design by taking uncertainty into consideration. This is accomplished by bridging the gap between relevant expertise in power systems, data mining and optimization, meteorology, as well as energy economics. As the name of the group suggests, the specific areas of research of its members are divided in two groups: i) Energy Analytics and ii) Markets. In Energy Analytics we focus on forecasting the various quantities of energy systems, such as wind power, energy consumption and the corresponding prices, and on developing decision making tools in a market environment. This is supported by a serious commitment in data mining and analysis of increasing quantity of power and meteorological data with high spatial and temporal resolutions. While research on Markets considers the development of new systems and market models that will be able to accommodate high shares of RES. These designs are tested under various uncertainties both from the generation and the demand side. The aim is to propose various approaches to market settlements (i.e. joint spot and balancing markets), define new market products and accomplish the efficient coordination of market and system operators. Furthermore, we follow closely the recent trends in EU which involve coupled day-ahead markets for the member states and co-ordination for balancing, by looking into coupling mechanisms that promote the effective cooperation between the power systems of various countries.