It is clear that dealing more than 150 power plants as sellers and 74 buyers (Including the RECs, EDCs, and the Retailers), and preserving the fairness of the market requires professional experts who utilize state of the art technologies. Achieving to a mature electricity market enriches our technical knowledge. Our experiences convince us to believe that we have the capability to share our experiences with other countries for power system restructuring in the following topics:
- Designing & implementation of power system restructuring project
- Designing & implementation of wholesale electricity market and required mechanisms for electricity trades
- Designing & implementation of parallel markets for trading the ancillary services
- Designing & implementation of power exchange
- Coordination of different markets for electricity trades
- Design and implementation of electricity market information system
- Development of electricity market billing software
- Training the electricity market skills
- Designing & implementation comprehensive database for electricity market relevant information
- Development of market clearing software (SCUC)
Designing a new structure for the generation, transmission and distribution system is the fundamental step for unbundling these main parts of the electricity industry. Benefitting from the knowledge of our experts, we have practically executed the unbundling process in Iran. We want to share these valuable experiences with other countries.
Designing new mechanisms and regulations, defining the structure of the trades, providing different environments for the electricity trades in a manner that guarantees the liquidity, diagnosing the bidding strategies, giving indirect incentives to the market players for actively participating in the electricity market, and also the market operation itself is the field that we could share our experiences with the applicants.
Generation and demand should be balanced second by second. For the power system to work properly, it is necessary to measure proper frequency control actions, provide reactive power control and have sufficient number of units with black start capabilities. In fact the system operator needs these kind of services to operate the power system with the predefined level of reliability and security. However, resources that can provide these kind of services are owned by market players. These requirements necessitates to establish parallel markets in which the system operator purchase these services. We have designed efficient and liquid markets for trading the ancillary service in the IGMC and our experiences enable us to share our experiences in designing and implementation of these kinds of markets with our other countries.
Due to the uncertainty and variability of spot market prices, significant risk is imposed to the market players who trade the electrical energy in the spot market. To increase the liquidity of the electricity market, one solution to make it possible is to trade the electrical energy in the power exchange. In fact, the forward contracts in the power exchange (for a week, month or a year) hedge the traders against the spot market volatile prices. Coordination of power exchange and spot market trades according to the electricity market rules is a factor that should also be taken into account for a proper power exchange design. IGMC has valuable experiences in this regard.
In a restructured power system, the market players could trade the electrical energy in several market environment such as the spot market (day-ahead and intraday), real time market or the bilateral contracts. Coordination of these markets needs to manage and process large amount of market players' data. Our experts, perfectly handles this complex task and we could share our experiences with the others in this regard.
Designing & implementation of electricity market information system (EMIS)
Currently, EMIS covers the requirements of IREMA. More than 25 million records are received each month and should be manage properly. Moreover, metering systems and national control center write the required records into the EMIS. Considering the development of the electricity market, EMIS enables us to manage and process this large amount of records.
- Fundamental data sub-system: including the data of generation companies, generation units and etc.
- Technical specification and reference data sub-system: including the technical specifications of generation units, unit limits and etc.
- Market players data exchange web-site:
- Data exchange with the sellers: gathering the hourly bidding prices of generation companies, and receiving the operating data including the forecasted generation dispatch of the generation companies
- o Data exchange with the buyers: hourly forecasted load and real consumption data
- Transmission companies data exchange
- Data exchange sub-system: exchanging the data with the systems providing the operational data of the power system such as Measurement Management System (MMS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (SCADA). This subsystem receives the required information and store the data in the EMIS
- Operational data processing sub-system: operational data of electricity market have several resources, so it is necessary to be processed. The output of this processing is some indexes which are important for calculating the electricity market financial transactions.
- Electricity market contracts sub-system: including the purchase, sale and transmission contracts. This sub-system registers the contract related data and continuously contact with the other sub-systems such as billing sub-system.
- Unit commitment sub-system (including the feature of making a connection to the generation scheduling software): a primitive prediction of generation and transit is derived for the future days. Then, a software solves the generation scheduling problem and the solution is stored in this sub-system as the generation system schedule for the next day.
- Billing sub-system for sellers, buyers and transmission service providers
- General market players' data sub-system: all of the electricity market required data such as, legal information of companies, corporate managers' documents, electricity market representatives, phone numbers, electricity market contracts are stored in this sub-system.
There is a continuous data exchange between the market players (sellers, buyers and transmission companies) and EMIS. This system could properly manage large amount of input and output data (about 30 million records per month). In should be mentioned that EMIS is the connection bridge between market operator and market players. Briefly, EMIS is a reliable, user friendly and useful information system that could bear the burden of electricity market data management.
Development of the electricity market billing software
Final results of electricity trades are reflected in the sellers' and buyers' bills. Large amount of data should be handled for issuing the market players' bills. This fact makes it impossible to do this task manually. It is essential to design a powerful, fast, reliable and flexible software to adapt with the probable modification of electricity market rules. This enables the market operator to issue the market players' bills in a short time. Iran electricity market billing software has been design and implemented by Iranian experts. Its main specifications are illustrated below. Satisfactory flexibility of this software enables it to cope with different market rules and make it possible to adjust the billing engine with different market specific conditions. Most important factors of our billing software are as follows:
Dynamic modification of billing rules and procedures by its user
1-Complying with dynamic and developing nature of electricity market
2-It is not nescessary to modify the source code to adopt with dynamic nature of electricity market
Compatible with large amount of input and output data
1-Working with more than 650 generation units
2-Billing according to the hourly opeation of all generation units
3-Indepndent billing for each operating hour
4-Handling with more than 40 million basic data and 200 intermediate variable
Fastness and high accuracy
1-Working with large amount of data
2-Novel techniques used for all levels of billing process including: gathering required information, calculationes and generating the required reports
3-Monthly bills are issued for more than 650 generation units in less than an hour
Report generation
1-Generating statistical reports for market operator and market players according to their requirement and authorizations
2-Generating more than 350 statistical, financial and managing reports per mounth
Automatic data exchange
1-Exchanging the required data with a certain database
2-Writing the results into the same database
Training the electricity market skills
Power system restructuring, participation of private owned companies (generation, transmission and distribution companies) in the electricity market, provide some opportunities for the market players to make profit in a competitive environment. Moreover, the power system assets are operated more efficiently and the burden of overinvestment should not be tolerated by the consumers any more. However, these infrastructures, software and information systems should be utilized be expert human resources in all parts of power system such as power plants, distribution companies, transmission companies, brokers, retailers, aggregators and so on. In fact human resources are the backbone of a restructured power system.
According to our experiences in the IREMA, training the human resources is the most important part of the power system restructuring. Deputy of electricity market in the IGMC, cooperating with the research and education institutes, has a great reputation in training the human resources. Short term, medium term and long term electricity market training courses by expert Iranian lecturers could complete the power system restructuring process.
Designing a comprehensive database for electricity market data
Electricity market trading data, sellers’ bidding prices, buyers’ offers, technical specification of power plants, transmission and distribution companies, electricity market bills and etc. , have a great financial value. This fact enhances the importance of information security in the electricity market. For a continuous operation of electricity market, it is essential to use a database with high level of security and perfect speed. It could facilitate to give the required service to the market players. IREMA data base has been establish using cutting edge software and hardware technologies. Each year, more than 300 million records are entered to this data base. Considering the developing nature of the electricity market, it will be expected to have significant growth in the amount of input records for the coming years. IGMC and active companies in the field of electricity markets are ready to provide technical and engineering services to the applicants.
Development of the market clearing software
In IREMA, a sophisticated optimization problem is solved to clear the wholesale day-ahead market. Dealing with more than 150 power plants, more than 2500 system buses, various kind of security constraints, they all have been taken care of within our security constraint unit commitment software. Every days, our market has been cleared by our developed software that handles the operational problems of market clearing.