Such a long-term sustainable market design needs to provide efficient operational and investment incentives for an electricity system that is characterized by a high share of variable renewable energy sources, that is highly integrated with sectors such as home heating and cooling and transport, and needs to provide efficient incentives for the participation of all demand, from households to industrial consumers. It needs to provide security of supply by ensuring sufficient controllable electricity generation capacity without becoming too costly. And despite the variability of solar and wind energy the price risk must be limited: for investors, so the cost of capital does not become too high, and for consumers so they are not exposed to unmanageable swings in their energy expenses.

In this project, a market design will be developed that meets these objectives. It will be tested in a sophisticated simulation environment in which real-world characteristics such as actors’ limited foresight into the future and risk aversion are included. The performance of the market design – with respect to quantitative indicators such as security of supply, average costs to consumers and investment cost recovery – will be compared to a benchmark calculation of an optimal power system, which will also be developed in this project. We will involve representatives of all key stakeholder groups – consumers, large and small power generators, network operators and government in all phases of the process, in the market design as well as the development of the optimization and simulation models, in order to ensure the social acceptability of the research process and outcomes.