Real-time pricing (RTP) goes live on 1 November 2022. The implementation of RTP will necessitate changes to a lot of the data received, processed, and published by the EMI team. If you are a regular user of Wholesale reports or Wholesale datasets, you might want to keep an eye on this discussion for regular updates over the next few weeks.
Changes are going to be made with very little notice. Some reports or datasets may be stopped altogether on 1 November and restored in the following days or weeks.
vSPD and GDX files
The vSPD model is undergoing substantial change and testing in readiness for real-time pricing. A new version of vSPD will very soon be made available. It will not be backward compatible with the current version. After 1 November 2022, if you want to run simulations that span 30 Oct / 1 Nov 2022, you’ll need to use both versions of vSPD, i.e. the current and the new versions.
GDX files are currently produced from the ex post final pricing (FP) SPD cases. FP GDX files will cease to exist after 1 November and in their place GDX files will be produced from the real-time dispatch (RTD) cases. There will be an indeterminate number of these per day but typically there will be well over 200. These new RTD GDX files will be published beginning 1 Nov. At some point after 1 November 2022, we will change the GDX processing to package all RTD GDXs for a day (midnight to midnight) into a single GDX file, which will be published early in the morning (2-3am’ish) of the following day. The daily RTD GDX file, when we start publishing it, will be approximately six times larger than the current FP GDX files.
Dispatch and pricing
A new wholesale dataset folder will be created called DispatchAndPricing. Beginning on 1 November, the following datasets will be published into subfolders of this new folder as follows:
- DispatchEnergyPrices – Dispatch energy prices: the ‘new’ real-time energy prices that will replace the current real-time (or 5-min) prices published here. The current real-time prices will cease to be produced from 1 Nov.
- DispatchReservePrices – Dispatch reserve prices: the 'new' real-time reserve prices.
- GDX: the RTD GDX files as described above.
- CaseFiles – RTD case files: the RTD case files.
- InterimPrices – Interim prices: from 1 November 2022, interim prices will be calculated as a time-weighted average of the 'new' real-time prices. Interim prices will pertain to the entire trading period.
- FinalPrices – Final prices: if no pricing error claim is lodged pertaining to interim prices, then interim prices will be declared final by 2pm the following business day. Whereas interim prices will be published by trading period, i.e. one file per trading period, final prices will be published by day, i.e. one file per day containing prices for all trading periods from the previous day.
vSPD online
vSPD online will be disabled on 1 November until such time as we get it rebuilt to work with both the new and old versions of vSPD.
Final pricing dataset
The final pricing dataset will cease to be populated beginning on 1 November 2022. The entire folder will likely be archived within the Dispatch and pricing folder described above.
