AMIRIS

Flexible and fast evaluation of policy instruments

AMIRIS ("Agent-based Market Model for the Investigation of Renewable and Integrated Energy Systems") enables researchers to evaluate future energy markets, their market design, and energy-related policy instruments.
The model allows investigating the influence of regulatory framework conditions on the behavior and profitability of energy market actors. And it enables quantifying the influence of actors, their uncertainties and socioeconomic decisions on energy markets.
AMIRIS computes electricity prices endogenously based on the simulation of strategic bidding behavior of prototyped market actors on electricity markets. This bidding behavior does not only reflect marginal prices, but can also consider effects of support instruments like market premia, uncertainties and limited information, or market power.
Due to its modular nature, AMIRIS can be easily expanded and it is lightning fast: even large agent systems and many model years can be simulated in an hourly resolution in less than a minute.

Use-Cases

Design and Modeling of New Markets and Negotiation Mechanisms for a ~100% Renewable Power System. See traderes.eu.

For the analysis whether financial support will be required for de-risking investment in renewables, cost recovery rates have been assessed, taking into account the impact of different remuneration schemes.
Following support instruments have been implemented in AMIRIS: Fixed market premium (MPFIX), one-way contracts for difference (1-WAY-CFD), two-way CfD (2-WAY-CFD), capacity premium (CP), financial CfD (FIN-CFD). The solid bars represent the cost recovery rate from market revenues, while the hatched bars represent the cost recovery rate from support payments.
The results show the necessity for support instruments to mitigate the risks associated with investment in a 100% renewables scenario. In particular, small-scale PV cannot refinance on the market. All support instruments considered guarantee at least 100% refinancing. Production-dependent support instruments cause dispatch distortions. For example, two-way CfDs have the effect of increasing market-based curtailment, leading to higher market prices that benefit the market-based refinancing, but must be borne by end users.

References

Schimeczek et al. (2025) AMIRIS - the open Agent-based Electricity Market Model: Assessing Market Perspectives for Energy Technologies. EERA JP-ESI Workshop: How energy system modelling can inform technology development, 2025-10-22, Brussels, Belgium. https://elib.dlr.de/218555/

Schimeczek et al. (2023). AMIRIS: Agent-based Market model for the Investigation of Renewable and Integrated energy Systems. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(84), 5041, doi: 10.21105/joss.05041

Schimeczek et al. (2023). FAME-Core: An open Framework for distributed Agent-based Modelling of Energy systems. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(84), 5087, doi: 10.21105/joss.05087

Further Information

Contact: amiris@dlr.de

AMIRIS

Projekt TradeRES:

Projekt ERAFlex II:

Projekt FEAT + EN4U:

References