Introduction

Introduction

Maon is an integrated simulation environment designed for fundamental analysis of electricity, gas, and emissions markets. It enables the forecasting of supply and demand dispatches, capacity expansions as well as price and volume risk quantifications.

The market simulation considers a range of components. It models for example battery storages, bioenergy plants, electric vehicles, electrolyzers, heat pumps, hydropower plants, interconnectors, solar panels, thermal power plants, and wind turbines. The spatial coverage can range from local portfolios to whole continents.

Web browsers provide access to the 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 metrics.

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 assess the market value of power plants via outputs like market revenue, capture rates, load factor, fuel consumption, emission cost or start count.

Uniqueness

Maon empowers users to make substantiated, traceable, and resilient decisions with seamless insights into electricity wholesale markets, grounded in the following distinctive features:

  • Realistic: Maon delivers highly realistic market simulations by addressing challenges such as negative spot prices, metrics for individual facility investments, and probability assessments. With accurate assumptions, annual base power prices can be forecasted within an accuracy of less than one Euro per megawatt-hour.
  • Fast: Maon’s automation minimizes manual data handling, streamlines simulation runs, and accelerates data validation and analysis. It enables faster, more confident decision-making. For instance, users can parameterize and initiate sensitivity analyses in under one minute.
  • Integrated: Leveraging a unified data source and integrated simulation methodology, 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.

Key characteristics

  • Fundamental: Market simulation based on the fundamentals of economics and technology with transparent interfaces to quantify influences, retrace results and decide rationally.
  • High resolution: Comprehensive models for consumers, renewables, hydropower, batteries, thermal plants and grid elements to assess individual components and to forecast accurately.
  • Large-scale: Simulation of the market coupling in whole Europe with the same high spatial and temporal resolution to avoid biased results and assess equally.
  • Web application: Multi-user, multi-interface and multi-format environment for collaborative, parallel and fast simulations.
  • All-in-one: High-performance computing, data storing, simulation application, data management and interactive analysis linked and integrated into single solution.
  • Productive: Scenario tree handling through inheritance to keep scenarios consistent to each other, re-use data, and minimize manual parametrization efforts.
  • Automated: Parametrization and start of sensitivities in below one minute. Simulation resolution can be varied for runs between minutes and hours. Interactive result graphs load in seconds.
  • Made in Germany: Model research, software development and data security are made in Germany. All web, calculation and storage servers of Maon are physically located in Germany.

Documentation coverage

The purpose of this documentation is to provide a systematic introduction and explanation to the principles of electricity markets in reality as well as its simulation though data and models at Maon. It aims to provide pragmatic, precise and comprehensive information about the use of Maon through concise textual definitions and simple illustrative examples. This documentation makes references to more detailed articles on Wikipedia and other external sources where appropriate.

Fundamentals