EMIS: Electricity Markets Investment Suite Model

NREL's Electricity Markets Investment Suite (EMIS) model is an open-source, agent-based capacity expansion model designed to capture the interactions among wholesale electricity market design, investment decisions, and resource adequacy.

Unlike traditional capacity expansion models that assume a central planner with perfect information and guaranteed cost recovery of new investments, EMIS models investment and retirement decisions by a set of profit-seeking agents with imperfect information about the future and no guarantee of cost recovery. These customizable investor agents can make recourse decisions in response to system outcomes that differ from their expectations. Furthermore, the agents have different risk attitudes, beliefs about the future, technology preferences, and financing parameters.

The purpose of EMIS is to provide insights into how various market structures, rules, and products can impact not only the price and revenue outcomes for a single year but also the longer-term feedback effects on investment and retirement decisions over many years or decades. By capturing investment-level uncertainty and risk, EMIS can also help users understand the impact of imperfect information in each agent's investment portfolio (such as wind, solar, hydropower, and more). And like most capacity expansion models, EMIS can evaluate different future economic, policy, and system conditions. EMIS leverages the production cost modeling capability within Sienna to model multistate market operations and clearing for energy and operating reserves.

EMIS also assesses and incorporates resource adequacy into the market structures in each investment period, allowing users to better explore the interaction between market design and resource adequacy across the operational and investment time scales. This is made possible by a link with the Probabilistic Resource Adequacy Suite (PRAS).

The full effect of the operations, investment, and resource adequacy within a paradigm of imperfect information helps EMIS simulate an evolving energy portfolio that is optimized for reliability and affordability under uncertainty.

Capabilities

EMIS allows users to customize market products and rules as well as customize the set of investor agents and their financing strategies, technology preferences, and attitudes toward risk under uncertainty. Here’s how it works:

• Data integration: The user enters energy systems data. Key data points include the existing test system configuration and portfolio, investment and operations cost for potential new resources, time series data for future weather and load conditions, uncertainty parameters, market designs and operational settings, investor agent characteristics, financing parameters, and the specified investment horizon.
  
  
• Simulation engine: Once the data is entered, the tool is then run (typically on NREL’s High Performance Computing resources) for the specified investment horizon. Users can run a suite of scenarios to explore a range of potential economic, policy, or market conditions.
  
  
• Scenario analysis: Users can analyze a wide range of model outputs, including price, revenue, profit, resource adequacy, investment/retirement, operations, and system cost.
  
  
• Tools integration: EMIS offers also seamless tools integration between a custom capacity expansion model and state-of-the-art production cost (Sienna) and probabilistic resource adequacy (PRAS) models.

By capturing the impact of these factors, EMIS can inform market, policy, and regulatory decisions for improving economic efficiency and reliability in the electricity investment sector.

Publications

Planning and Operations in Electricity Markets Under System Transformation: Key Research Findings, Argonne National Laboratory Technical Report (2024)

Can Wholesale Electricity Markets Achieve Resource Adequacy and High Clean Energy Generation Targets in the Presence of Self-Interested Actors?, Applied Energy (2024)
This study utilizes the EMIS tool to evaluate the effectiveness of different wholesale electricity market structures in achieving resource adequacy and clean energy goals, accounting for the behavior of self-interested investors.

The Interaction of Wholesale Electricity Market Structures Under Futures With Decarbonization Policy Goals: A Complexity Conundrum, Applied Energy (2023)
This analysis examines how different wholesale market structures, such as capacity markets and operating reserve demand curves, interact with decarbonization policy goals to achieve resource adequacy and high clean energy targets.

Modeling Investment Decisions From Heterogeneous Firms Under Imperfect Information and Risk in Wholesale Electricity Markets, Applied Energy (2022)
This study explores how firms with different attributes and information levels make investment decisions in electricity markets, highlighting the role of risk and imperfect information.

Related Resources

EMIS AgentSimulation Model, GitHub (2024)

Wholesale Electricity Markets and Resource Adequacy With High Clean Energy Generation Targets, ESIG Forecasting and Markets Workshop (2024)

Market and Retail-Rate Know-How for the Energy Transition, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (2024)

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