The "hard core" that is ignored in the electricity spot market is changing

As of the end of June, the first batch of eight power spot market construction pilot projects in China have all started trial operation. In addition to subverting the dispatch model and price mechanism, the spot market will also have a certain effect on the hardware and cross-border technology applications of the power industry.

The core logic of the design of the electricity spot market mainly includes two points: one is the change from rough to precise electricity price discovery, and the other is the change from extensive to refined power balance and grid security management. The transformation of work processes and efficiency such as operation, settlement, and market services not only puts higher requirements on practitioners, but also requires more sophisticated hardware support.

Taking metering devices as an example, in the spot market, all market meters must be able to record and store the electric energy data of power generation units, inter-provincial interconnection lines, other related interconnection lines and market users in each trading period, and can be read and collected remotely or automatically. In addition, the metering data of the main meter and the backup secondary meter should be readable, and the operational metering data of the implementation system can also be used as backup data.

So far, the metering equipment systems of power generation and consumption parties and interconnection lines in some pilot provinces and regions have reached the standards, but some provinces and regions still do not have such hardware conditions, so their market rules are more immature. According to the author's understanding, it took one and a half years from the beginning of the metering transformation in one of the pilot provinces to the market trial operation. Due to the limitations of the collection terminal, transmission channel and data master station, although the meters of some low-voltage users have the ability to measure and store electricity data once an hour, these data cannot be collected remotely.

For power grid companies, this is a considerable investment in market construction. However, in the long run, it has accumulated a lot of data foundation for the digital transformation of enterprises and improved the efficiency of the industrial chain.

As the market starts to operate, the working frequency of institutions or departments such as dispatching, trading, and marketing is likely to increase. For example, dispatching needs to analyze the operating results formed by the participation of market entities in reporting and quoting, trading needs to face thousands of inquiries from market entities, and the marketing department needs to cooperate with spot clearing to shorten the settlement cycle, etc. On the eve of the trial settlement of the Guangdong spot market, trading practitioners said that "the phone was blown up", and then released a "question and answer" on the official public platform. This reminds me of Taobao, which was in a period of explosive growth. Shop owners and clerks took turns to answer consumer inquiries 24 hours a day until the AI ​​"little secretary" came to the rescue.

In fact, there are also cases of using AI technology to reduce repetitive work in the power industry. On the morning of January 12, 2019, Pachi, the country's first virtual artificial intelligence (AI) distribution network dispatcher, officially took up his post at the distribution network dispatch command center of Hangzhou Power Supply Company in Zhejiang Province. According to the State Grid, Pachi is competent for several fixed tasks such as fault judgment, plan issuance, and emergency repair command, and can understand professional terms with Hangzhou and surrounding dialects.

The application of intelligent technology may have been a great help to the power grid in the past, but with the continuous increase in market players and the exponential growth of market data, the application of intelligent auxiliary roles to reduce repetitive work and lower the rate of human error may gradually become a "must-have".

In addition, market supervision cannot do without the addition of digital means. Perhaps by building certain mechanisms when designing the market, the probability of market players exercising their market power can be minimized, but supervision of the volume and quotation behavior of market players is still essential. In the case of insufficient manpower in the regulatory agency, the system can realize all-round and real-time collection and transmission of information to back-end supervisors, and conduct preliminary analysis and screening, which not only infinitely compresses the space for human intervention in the transaction process, but also provides a solid basis for post-event supervision.