Draft Charter - Energy Market Information Exchange

[William Cox <wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com>]

I've attached a draft charter for the proposed OASIS Energy Market Information Exchange (eMIX) Technical Committee.

This TC is intended to address the prices, market characteristics, and other information for energy trading, buying, and selling. I was inspired to start working on this from discussions in and around the NIST Building-to-Grid and Industry-to-Grid Domain Expert Working Groups, and continued interest from first round reviewers and from people attending GridEcon 2009 in Chicago (http://www.gridecon.com -- slides are available on line at the agenda link).

From my perspective as an enterprise software architect, this fits into a simple three layer stack with interoperation protocols (how to communicate) as the fundamental layer. I put the Energy Interoperation TC/OpenADR work here, with parts of the message payload in the next layer.

The middle layer is what is communicated -- for markets, things like price, quantity, units, time (of use), and characteristics of the energy sold -- from source (e.g. gas-fired plants, coal, solar, coal plant with scrubbers, wind) to derived information (e.g. carbon data), and also trading information (is this a bid, a price quote, an accepted transaction?).

The goal is to create an XML vocabulary that can be used in a broad range of market exchanges with minimal differences (and where there are differences, arranged in a simple way) for the various consumers of the information.

The third layer is the market design and definition; since markets have varying degrees of complexity I'm leaving this alone for now :-). This is a potentially complex area, and an interesting one. Accordingly, I'd like to carefully define the EMIX work to focus on layer two.

I invite you to participate in a discussion on how to improve this charter, as well as the sorts of characteristics that are important to energy markets.

If you would like to be listed on the charter when submitted as a supporter, please contact me or Toby Considine.

Comments to me or (preferably) to the list. Please reference line numbers where appropriate.

Thanks!

--
William Cox
Email: wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com
Web: http://www.CoxSoftwareArchitects.com
+1 862 485 3696 mobile
+1 908 277 3460 fax

Energy Market Information Exchange TC Charter 20090330.pdf