Our society is facing unprecedented challenges. The climate crisis is omnipresent, and begs the question: How can we live more sustainably and efficiently? For Prof. Dr Wolfgang Ketter (coordinator of the WiSo Key Research Initiative "Sustainable, Smart Energy and Mobility" and Director of the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne (EWI) and his colleague John Collins , the question becomes more specific: how can we use rapidly expanding computing power to create a more sustainable and efficient economy and society?
With their open energy system model Power TAC, both scientists are enabling multidisciplinary research to contribute to finding the answers. Power TAC is an artificial-intelligence-driven competitive simulation platform that uses Competitive Benchmarking to drive research in collaboration with contributors all over the world. The Competitive Benchmarking research model has three components: a Platform, regular Competitions, and period Alignment. The platform is the Power TAC simulation of retail electric power markets with a high degree of realism. Competitions invite research groups all over the world to develop autonomous trading agents that offer tariff contracts to simulated customers, trade in a realistic wholesale market, and are responsible for balancing supply and demand within their portfolios. Agents compete with each other directly, aiming to have the largest bank balance at the end of a simulation session. Alignment updates the simulation models to add new customer types, use interesting historical weather patterns, model additional types of renewable generation and energy storage systems, and model real and proposed policies and regulatory constraints.
The annual Power TAC tournament in particular is used to give researchers and users “a window into the future," says Wolfgang Ketter. With this tool, it would have been possible to predict market failures like the California energy crisis of 2000-2001. These days, the energy production, distribution, and consumption landscape are significantly altered by the inclusion of more electric vehicles and weather-dependent renewables, but also by the changes in demand resulting from greater weather extremes. Power TAC can simulate retail electricity market performance as, for example, more retail customers become ‘prosumers’ or more businesses offer demand flexibility services such as ‘virtual power planting’ of electric vehicle fleets.
Prof. Dr. Ketter hopes that Power TAC will encourage both policymakers and businesses to develop and coordinate projects and new business models that exploit market drivers to encourage more energy efficiency and demand flexibility. On the one hand for example, it would be possible for users to charge their electric car at the most favorable time for them with the help of the tool, without having to physically participate in it themselves. On the other hand, electricity providers can learn how to either store or redirect their already generated electricity more efficiently. Overall, the market would waste much less energy and thus take another step in the right direction of a sustainable energy market.