Power TAC: A competitive economic simulation of the smart grid

- There is a need to motivate sustainable behaviors in retail electricity markets.
- Existing centralized controls do not handle distributed sources effectively.
- The Power TAC competitive simulation models future retail energy markets.
- Power TAC supports a variety of research methods and agendas.

Sustainable energy systems of the future will need more than efficient, clean, low-cost, renewable energy sources; they will also need efficient price signals that motivate sustainable energy consumption as well as a better real-time alignment of energy demand and supply. The Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) is a rich competitive simulation of future retail power markets. This simulation will help us to understand the dynamics of customer and retailer decision-making and the robustness of market designs, by stimulating researchers to develop broker agents and benchmark them against each other. This will provide compelling, actionable information for policymakers and industry leaders. We describe the competition scenario in detail, and we demonstrate behaviors that arise from the interaction of customer and broker models.