IES Research and Development is central to IES providing leading advice in market reform, management and operation of energy markets, participant trading and risk assessment, generator operations and quantitative projections of possible future market outcomes. IES’s R&D activities are focussed on aspects of market or participant operations that can be improved with better analysis or tools. It has also been active in developing concepts and formulating models in areas unrelated to electricity markets.
While the R&D group does have staff dedicated to this activity, it also draws on the experience and expertise of people from the advisory and software development groups.
Current and past R&D work undertaken by current IES staff includes:
- Formulation of market concepts with the UNSW over twenty years ago, the development of wholesale market rules in the Victorian market and the development of many aspects of Australia’s National Electricity Market design, including developing arrangements for merchant transmission, auction of interconnector settlement residues and ancillary service arrangements.
- Research into real time pricing and its relationship to the control of system frequency.
- Development of the ancillary service arrangements in the NEM, in particular, the spot market arrangements for frequency control services and the causer pays arrangements for cost recovery.
- Development of a variety of dispatch engines including a generic dispatch engine that is a generalisation of the markets in Australia, NZ, Singapore, Philippines and most regional or nodal markets and a non-linear programming version of an AC dispatch optimisation.
- Currently we are investigating the management of system security in the dispatch process including the potential to develop constraints on the fly and solving a stochastic optimisation that ensures physical feasibility of the dispatch following any of a set of contingencies.
- Research and development of models that can capture the key aspects of the REC market including banking of RECs, arbitrage relationships between REC prices and the variable annual REC production of hydro and other renewable power stations.
- Joint research with the Bureau of Meterology on stochastic process models for temperatures and electricity loads.
- Research and development of participant decision support systems to aid spot market trading and portfolio optimisation.
- Research into approaches to modelling generator behaviour in competitive electricity markets including game theoretic based approaches and the development of tools to visualise actual generator behaviour based on market data for offers, loads, prices etc.
- Development of concepts and algorithms underlying the PROPHET and NEO electricity market models.
- Development of a model for planning coal mining and shipping.
- Development of concepts and a suite of models for road and bridge maintenance.
IES Research & Development is a division of Intelligent Energy Systems—an Australian company trading since 1983.