Axpo Solutions AG - Application for the automatic placement of bids

„We have achieved our project goals and it is a great achievement for all involved that we can now announce the successful market launch as a "first mover" of IM and TERRE.“

Roman von Siebenthal, Head Forward Trading

Challenge
The electricity market is on the move. The focus of electricity trading activities in Switzerland and Europe is increasingly shifting to products that can be delivered at short notice and to national and international balancing power markets. The balancing or reserve power ensures that the supply of electricity to customers of exactly the required amount of electrical power can always be guaranteed, even in the event of unforeseen events in the electricity grid.

In order to always be balanced in terms of supply and demand, the grid operator Swissgrid is dependent on suppliers who can also deliver or purchase electricity at short notice. It is precisely this kind of supply and demand that is traded on the electricity exchange. In order to be able to sell, the electricity supplier must know the capacities of its power plants in real time. From this data and other parameters such as price and volume, an application should automatically place bids. This is because trading on the exchange takes place every hour, including at night.

Solution
Axpo employees from Trading Information Management and Trading, in collaboration with iRIX Software Engineering AG, have implemented an application to enable them to operate successfully in two new tertiary control energy markets in Switzerland and Europe. Thanks to this innovative application, fluctuations in the power grid can be balanced even better, power interruptions can be prevented, and additional income can be generated.

Added value for the client
Thanks to this solution, the electricity producer Axpo Solutions AG managed to enter the new exchanges. Bids with all the necessary information are now generated automatically and placed on the exchange by the application depending on Axpo’s own capacities. Axpo received the necessary flexibility from the iRIX specialists to successfully launch the solution, even though only a few days were available for a test run and the coordination of the systems with each other. Thanks to meticulous preparation, this was also successful. Since the start of trading, Axpo has also been represented on the new exchange and is successfully participating through the automated trading of its power capacities. The application also forms a good basis for future requirements in trading on the international electricity markets.

JBoss EAP, Java / JEE, Oracle, Apache Camel, REST, .NET C#