European Energy Markets 2024 in Istanbul

This week, I attended the International conference on European Energy Markets 2024 (EEM24). The conference is tightly related to my research field of energy market simulation and I presented a paper about a comparison of two market simulation tools. It took place in the Kadir Has Üniversitesi, which is a private university in Istanbul.

While there were 3 conference days, I did spend a whole week in Istanbul, Türkiye - so that I had a few days of traveling and vacation as well to explore the city and to make the long duration of travel worth it.

EEM24 Conference

The conference was generally very helpful and fruitful. It started with two keynote sessions with various speakers.

One of the keynote speakers started early as the previous talk was shorter, so he just claimed that time for himself and spoke about twice as much as scheduled for him, which left room for improvement even for well-paid researchers. One of the keynote speakers attended online from GB but the wifi connection in the Khadir Has university was quite congested which led to frequent interruptions and a final cut off during the talk, which was quite a pity.

After the keynotes, there were 5 parallel sessions with 5 to 7 presentations each. I had my talk about my paper on the first day in the middle of the session, which was quite a pleasure as many researchers attended this session. You can find the slides here.

After lunch another section of parallel sessions took place. Overall one has a lot of input and the conference featured 164 scientific presentations in total (plus the keynotes).

Highlights

Some interesting points from the conference are highlighted below

5-Minute markets

• The general idea is to better match actual load/generation
• When batteries are used as flexible load/generation on balancing markets, switching to a 5 minute market instead of hourly doubles the arbitrage possibility and revenue
• TenneT said to vote for a 5-minute clearing instead of the existing 15-minute ahead intraday auction clearing

Flexible bids

Someone from TenneT gave a talk about GOPACS bids and that current options for flexible bids are not enough. Generally there are base/standard, linked and exclusive bids. Taking a look at exclusive bids, the current system only allows flexibility in volume. The market can calculate how much volume of a given bid is accepted on the market - the market has the flexbility to decide the amount. Yet there is no option to communicate to the market, that the dispatch hour is also flexible in a bid. The only option like this are linked bids which give multiple choices to the market of which the clearing algorithm can decide only one of the hours. Instead it would be better to have a new bidding type which covers the flexiblilty available in DSM, storages and current power systems.

Market regulation and CO₂ markets

There were very intersting talks about the coupling of the european (so EU) CO₂ price and the Turkiye market. While typically attending to energy informatics conferences, the EEM does also bring economists and lawyers together, which brings valuable insights about topics which I often never heard about, like the CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism).

Counter-intuitive flows

Having flow-based day-ahead market coupling for the CORE region in charge (since 2022), weird effects can happen, where the optimal result of the market dispatch includes a counter-intuitive result - meaning that electricity flows from a more expensive market region towards the cheaper region exist.

I did not yet deep-dive into the reasons for that, but one can find out more about the reasons in this LinkedIn blog series.

Integration of hydrogen

Hydrogen is not my major topic and general research and consensus shows, that it is neither a game changer in private heating nor in transportation on the road. Yet it still is a very important role in the switch of our energy systems to renewable energies as storage and decarbonization method where other methods are not capable.

As most research institutes do have an engineering background, it was noted that the capabilities to understand and discu while our institute at the FH Aachen basically has expertise or better said researchers active in both fields. Yet we do not have a research project which covers a coupling between the research groups yet.

Three-Power powerplant / GuD (Gas und Dampfturbine)

Talkig about coupling, there are modern gas turbines which have two cycles - one for gas and one for steam. Having a gas turbine which heats water with the excess energy afterwards to use the resulting steam in a steam turbine is much more efficient to generate electricity from gas. When adding heat coupling (KWK - Kraft-Wärme-Kopplung) by using the lower temperature output water for heating in houses, this is a very important factor and might be a middle-term game changer.

Interestingly, there are not many institutes having a focus on that yet with actual access and test devices (Prüfstand) available.

Conference program

Eduroam

I really do not know why the educational wifi does not work at so many places, while it is such a good thing to have for the whole international research community. Fortunately, they had another guest login, yet the general wifi performance was not very good.

Boat tour

In the evening we had a boat tour with free drinks and buffet which took multiple hours. This was mainly a networking and communication event which went very well. Though I surely missed a little of the cultural highlights of the boat tour.

Gala dinner

The second evening included a gala dinner in the Legacy Ottoman Hotel. It was not possible to order vegan or even vegetarian food there, which was generally a challenge for multiple people. Seems like verzicht of meat is not that popular yet in Türkiye, which was confirmed by a local vegetarian who somehow still eats meat to get along when eating out.

At the gala dinner, there was also live music which was actually well aufgenommen and actually led to people dancing and partying after the conference dinner, which I found quite cool and did not really expect that openness while at the official place.

Funny thing was also, that the hotel somehow did not have any white wine and cola/coke at some time, which I found quite unusual I expected the general supply of such a reputable hotel to be much higher than a single day of demand, but eventually, the hotel did have a different drinking expectation from their guests.

When the location wanted to close, some went to a different bar, where we spent another few hours of networking. Funnily, I always have really deep and technical discussions during such events, so this actually might sound like a lot of fun and drinking, but it actually always brings fruitful discussions, advice and information with it, which one would not get in other situations.

Of course, the requirement to socialize the whole time and talk about research related topics is also very exhausting and not the best for everyone, though it suits myself quite well (we do sometimes also talk about other things with each other, just to not create a wrong image of us researchers).

Vacation days

As various other researchers were also staying a few more days in Istanbul, I did spent a little more time with them, as I like company on vacation quite well.

Blue Mosque

The blue mosque is open in these specific times (in time of congregational prayer):

• 8:30-12:15
• 14:00-16:45
• 17:45-18:45

While other information said that it is just closed for 30 minutes after the muezzin called. It is free and very worth a visit. It was my first visit in a mosque so I was excited to see it from the inside too.

Prince Islands

The Prince Islands are about 25 kilometers away from Istanbul, but there is a public ferry going to all the islands for 2€ per trip. It is said to be a great option to experience swimming and a beach near to Istanbul, though I can not really recommend that.

Before going there, I ate corn in Kabatas.

A tourist who visited the 4 prince islands said, that Burgazada is the most beautiful, yet one can spend a whole day on Adalar (the largest of the islands).

Arriving at the Adalar Prince Island, I found that there was very little to do, except for renting a bicycle for 80 TL per hour and taking a ride around the island.

Unfortunately, most of the beaches were closed, one beach only allows couples/families - no singles, a couple must be of different sex - while the beach is also quiet expensive with 300 TL just to go there, even if it only is for one hour.

Therefore, we were left to take a dip into the ocean on the prince island in a small place where anybody could go, though it doesn’t look to nice. A friend of mine and I left our belongings at the beach and did not have problems with it, except for a seagull which tried to steal pastry from us.

Great Bazar and Spice Bazar

The Spice Bazar is a house which includes many options to buy spices and tea at. It is also known as the “Egyptian Bazaar” as it was built by reveneus from Egypt in 1660.

Besides that, there is also the Big Bazaar which has a lot of different fabric goods, souvenirs, fake clothes and sun glasses. All the stores offer basically the same which makes the whole big bazar and its size quite absurd. Though there is always somehow something new in every store which makes it worth it.

I found that once can start with 60% of the given price to go from for example 2570 TL/kg to 1800 TL/kg which is a reduction of about 30%. I also had the opportunity to buy socks for 200 TL instead of 300 TL, though they were not of good quality.

The people at the bazaar surely still have a quite high margin, but it is an interesting experience to bargain as you typically are not doing this in Germany.

The shadow side of this is the enormous trash on the street from the shipments, which can be seen in some nights, where multiple white vans arrive and are full of new goods. The extend of the consum is quite big.

Fitas Pasaji

Before arriving at our night location for some undergroundish music, we experienced a heavy thunder and rain at taksim square. According to the seconds between lightning and thunder, the lightning was less than 600 m away. As the streets got emptier and people found shelter at the side of the street, I finished my Çiğ köfte sandwich and went to the Fitas Pasaji.

The Fitas Pasaji is a house with various fast food chains on the entrance level, a billiard and bowling set in -1, an arcade gaming floor on -2, a dance hall on floor 1, a cinema on floor 3 and a restaurant and bar on floor 5. So a pretty cool building overall.

I went to an underground event there, consisting of two less known movies from 1989 (Santa Sangre) and 1972 (Pink Flamingos). I must say that the second movie was quite disturbing, though this was an intersting experience too.

After the two movies, an electro/techno party took place in -2, the arcade gaming area, where people danced on a bumper car area. Two hours later we found out, that there is another whole floor on floor 1 with techno music.

As one can see, there was only a small crowd, which is quite sad, as the nice event would have handled many more people in there. After partying until 4am, I want to the AirBnb of a friend and slept there.

The next morning, I went back to my hotel, and prepared myself for my departure.

Flight back

Unfortunately, my flight back home had 3 hours delay. In Türkiye, you get a small meal as compensation for waiting. Unfortunately, noone from the restaurants knew about this, so the only place one could eat something was Burger King, were one did get a small meal costing 10€ (299 TL).

Interesting trivia things

Lets finish this post about my experience in Istanbul with a list of random other parts:

• the tram is the way to move around, you pay very little per trip, independent of how many stations you are traveling
  • though there is no single public transport after 12 o clock and the first one starts at half past 6 in the morning..
  • tram cards can be reused as I wrote about the istanbul card
• cooled 0.5L water can always be bought for 10 TL about everywhere
• on the great basar, you have the best exchange rates as even locals exchange euros to lira here
  • this is notable on the spread between buy and sell, which is only 1% up and 1% down on some exchanges (less fees than I would have fees when taking money from an ATM with my card)
  • do not exchange money at places which only sell lira but do not buy in other touristic areas or advertise to have “no comission”
• there are no typical beggars sitting around and asking for money, but people trying to sell things - some have weird business cases:
  • selling tissues or water is very common
  • some also sell phone holders for your car on red traffic lights - I wonder how well that works
  • at night - even at 3 am - kids are walking around and are selling tissues or water a lot
• dogs and cats are walking around about everywhere
  • they are fed by people and have multiple places to get water from
  • at night you might see cats and dogs laying around in places, some in bad condition