This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2020 (Power TAC 2020).
Power TAC is a competitive simulation that models a “liberalized” retail electrical energy market,
where competing business entities or “brokers” offer energy services to customers through tariff
contracts, and must then serve those customers by trading in a wholesale market. Brokers are
challenged to maximize their profits by buying and selling energy in the wholesale and retail
markets, subject to fixed costs and constraints; the winner of an individual “game” is the broker
with the highest bank balance at the end of a simulation run. Costs include fees for publication and
withdrawal of tariffs, for rectifying supply-demand imbalances, for contributions to peak demand,
and for customer connections.
The simulation environment models a wholesale market, a regulated distribution utility,
and a population of energy customers, situated in a real location on Earth during a specific period
for which weather data is available. The wholesale market is a relatively simple call market,
similar to many existing wholesale electric power markets, such as Nord Pool in Scandinavia or
FERC markets in North America, but unlike the FERC markets we are modeling a single region,
and therefore we approximate the effects of locational-marginal pricing through manipulation of
the wholesale supply curve. Customer models include households, electric vehicles, and a variety
of commercial and industrial entities, many of whom have production capacity suc
