Market coupling simulator

It is crucial that electrical engineering students are exposed to the functioning of the electricity market. This paper discusses a lab developed for that purpose. In the lab, students are assigned a generation park with plants in different European countries. They compete to supply energy on a Web-based trading platform that coordinates trade in different European countries, given the offers to supply and demand energy and the available cross-border transmission capacities. A market-coupling algorithm is implemented in MATLAB based, on the principles of locational marginal pricing. The algorithm can be run through the WWW. The market coupling simulator is useful to test market-coupling algorithms and to confront students with some of the decisions generating companies take in liberalized electricity markets.