Wednesday, 21 May 2014

EXSTORM results update: prices tracking abundance

EXSTORM's discrete-event simulation work continues to illuminate the behaviour of Local Energy Markets (LEMs), and of how free peer-to-peer markets (with energy prices set mutually between households or small businesses, in real time) work with different kinds of trading heuristic.
Here we have a view of a day's trading in a LEM, with posted-price trading and abundance-follower price setting.
The blue dots show the varying abundance of locally generated energy, peaking around lunchtime (left hand scale, kW). The red dots show how much buyers are prepared to pay (right hand scale, £ per kWh). The green dots (same right hand scale) show vendors' offer price, which as you'd expect, tracks more or less the reciprocal of abundance.
Interestingly, at any point in time there's no single price that you could call 'the current LEM price': there's always a range of prices, arising from the subtly different trading positions of the many participants.