Market Operations

Nexant's market platform is an enterprise JAVA implementation of secure, scalable, and flexible business rules (derived from the stakeholder process) for designing and implementing an electricity market. The software architecture is well proven and is easily maintained by market operator IT staff. To implement a specific market, the platform is adapted by changing the calculation engine and the data interfaces-defining new configurations of the web-based market operator and market user interfaces. The core infrastructure for security, performance, and administration is retained for all markets.

This platform is expressly intended for the new generation of market systems, where pre-integrated system components, specifically designed for a particular type of market, are integrated within the overall market operator IT environment using service-oriented software interfaces and standard data exchange protocols such as the common information model (CIM). In particular, Nexant's market platform can easily interface with an energy management system, a credit management system, and any other IT systems deployed by the market operator. With clean interface design, the platform can be updated as frequently as necessary, to reflect changing market rules without impacting the surrounding systems.

The first success story for this market platform is in Nexant's i-HEDGE® financial transmission rights (FTR) system. This platform supports a variety of FTR markets within the U.S.-each market having its own business rules and other unique characteristics. Nexant is the only market system vendor who can maintain a series of such complex systems via a software product whose core infrastructure is common and whose business rules are easy to configure. For example, the platform's market operator interface (MOI) is designed as a suite of modular "managers" that can be added or modified to accommodate the special requirements of any market without impacting the manager modules for other markets. In the specific case of i-HEDGE, this flexibly designed platform has efficiently accelerated the time-to-market for new FTR products, such as long-term multi-period transmission rights, as requested by market participants and managed by the market operator.

Nexant's i-COMET® is another market system built on the same platform, using an innovative security constrained unit commitment (SCUC) calculation engine. As the concept of nodal markets expands globally, along with the need to mitigate risk for wholesale market participants, i-COMET® represents the next-generation of day-ahead market systems. It has better configuration capability and complete modeling of features such as emissions, reserves, intermittent resources, and demand response. It accommodates an interchangeable optimization algorithm interconnecting Nexant's own tool with any third-party tool. One unique feature of the calculation engine is that all parameters used within the market clearing formula can be modeled as time-dependent values, changing every user-configurable time period such as 1 hour, 15 minutes, etc. Nexant's i-COMET calculation approach is the result of working with major market operators and policymakers to address some of the present shortcomings of day-ahead market calculations.

Other market systems can be custom-built to address specialized products offered by the operator to market participants. For example, Nexant recently implemented a system to price reactive power within a major European market operator's grid. This system employed Nexant's optimal power flow calculation engine with full AC network representation.