Introduction

Maon

Maon, a blend word from market and simulation, pronounced “maa-on“
Figure 0: Maon, a blend word from market and simulation, pronounced “maa-on“

Maon is an integrated environment designed to forecast electricity wholesale markets. It enables the calculation of dispatches, capacity expansions, and probability distributions. Its resolution reaches the facility level, with quarter-hourly time steps spanning up to a hundred years and covering entire continents.

Web browsers provide access to the cloud-based data management, simulation, and analysis environment. It provides high-speed, high-resolution, and large-scale foresights. Scenarios can be parameterized by multiple users at the same time, calculated by one click, and collaboratively visually analyzed.

Users get support by work-leveraging parameterization tools, comprehensive quality checks, and interactive visualizations. Maon calculates not only deterministic and stochastic results like prices, dispatches, and capacities, but also costs, revenues, capture rates, net present values, and many other parameters.

Maon is developed, operated, and maintained by the Maon-Team.

Use cases

Maon can be used for short-term forecasts and long-term scenario analysis. These results enable a variety of different applications for transmission networks:

Equally, it can evaluate the market value of consumers, storages, and generators, addressing questions such as:

  • Forecasting power procurement cost for industrial sites, such as chemical or heavy metal manufacturing
  • Conducting assessments of new battery storages in day-ahead, intraday, and frequency reserve markets
  • Quantifying market revenues for European-wide large-scale power plant portfolios
  • Assessing impacts of new legislation, such as nuclear and hard coal phase-outs, on wholesale market

Targets

Maon is tailored to empower users to make substantiated, traceable, and resilient decisions based on insights into electricity wholesale markets. Therefore, it is built to achieve the following key targets:

  • Realistic: Maon delivers highly realistic market simulations by meeting challenges such as negative spot prices, individual facility investments, and uncertainty quantifications. With accurate assumptions, annual base power prices can be forecasted within an accuracy of less than one Euro per megawatt-hour.
  • Fast: Maon eliminates the need for handling source code or installing additional software. It operates seamlessly through commonly used web browsers. Its automation minimizes manual data handlings, streamlines simulations, and accelerates data validation and analysis. It enables faster, more confident decision-making. For example, users can parameterize and initiate sensitivity analyses in under one minute.
  • Integrated: Leveraging a unified data source and integrated simulation method, Maon provides comprehensive forecasts across various markets. It includes intraday, day-ahead, frequency reserves, and futures markets, as well as investment outcomes. This integrated, single-source, end-to-end approach ensures consistency in dispatch, investment, and uncertainty forecasts, leading to robust decisions.

Characteristics

To deliver closeness to reality, application speed, and result integration, the solution has the following key characteristics:

  • Fundamental: Market simulation based on economic and technological fundamentals, delivering consistent results, quantifiable impact assessments, traceable results, and support for rational decision-making.
  • High resolution: Comprehensive models for batteries, consumers, grid elements, hydropower, renewables, and thermal plants enable precise assessments and forecasts with hourly or quarter-hourly resolution.
  • Flexible horizon: Supports simulation horizons from a single hour to a century.
  • Geographic coverage: Simulates market coupling across entire continents, such as Europe, with equal high spatial and temporal resolution to ensure unbiased and comprehensive results.
  • Internet-based: Platform with browser-accessible interface and backend designed for manual and automated workflows, enabling rapid and efficient forecast creation.
  • Collaborative: Supports non-linear, parallel usage by multiple users, allowing for scenario parametrization, runs, and result analysis to be distributed across teams and performed in any order.
  • All-in-one: Integrates high-performance computing, data storage, simulation tools, and interactive analytics into a single seamless platform.
  • Scenario management: Streamlines scenario management through inheritance, ensuring consistency and reducing manual effort.
  • Automation: Enables parametrization and sensitivity analysis within a minute. Supports variable resolutions, with interactive result visualizations that load in seconds.
  • Made in Germany: Designed, developed, and hosted in Germany, ensuring strict compliance with rigorous data security standards. All servers for web, computation, and storage are physically located in Germany.

Contents

The best way to get started with Maon is by applying it after reading a brief primer.

This documentation explains the fundamentals of electricity markets, both in reality and their simulation through data and applications. It aims to foster understanding and equip users with the necessary skills.

Additionally, it serves as a input and output data reference, specifying their syntax and meaning.

For extended study, external sources like Wikipedia are linked.

Examples

Maon is proven in practice. Its application have been adopted successfully in various services and products. Examples of public applications by users are available on our homepage.

Start here