e-Hawk · Electricity market Hawkeye - An online surveillance tool to detect distortions in the supply-side of electricity markets

While electricity is a basic commodity that underpins industrialization, progress and the quality of life of human beings, its production, storage and transmission is strongly constrained by physical laws and its demand is utterly inelastic. All of this together exacerbates the vulnerability of a sector that is vital to modern societies. A critical and vulnerable sector is not only easily affected by external supply shocks, but also susceptible to manipulation and abuse. Spurred by the conviction that Science must serve the people, in this project we plan to develop and demonstrate the efficacy and usefulness of a tool to automatically alert about atypical distortions in the supply-side of electricity markets, such as those caused by the exercise of market power by energy companies with a dominant position. The tool combines such features that make it unique and the only one of its kind: it runs online and automatically, is purely data-driven, only fed with publicly available information, computationally cheap and able to learn and explain the context under which the distortion is more likely to occur. The scientific heart of the tool is Functional Statistics, and to build it, we will exploit novel notions and techniques for the identification of functional outliers that we developed within the framework of the ERC-STG project FlexAnalytics – Advanced Analytics to Empower the Small Flexible Consumers of Electricity. Our ambition is to equip market regulators and operators with a powerful instrument that not only brings benefits in terms of money saved for consumers, reduced time and effort in supervision and monitoring, and shorter delays in detecting potential offenders, but also and above all, allows regulators to fulfill their most sacred obligation more effectively and efficiently: to protect the weak.