Principled Data Completion of Network Constraints for Day Ahead Auctions in Power Markets

Network constraints play a key role in the price finding mechanism for European Power Markets, but historical data is very sparse and usually insufficient for many quantitative applications. We reconstruct the constraints data, known as the Power Transmission Distribution Factors (PTDFs) and Remaining Available Margins (RAMs), by first recovering the underlying time dependent signals known as the Generation Shift Keys (GSKs) and Phase Angles (PAs), and the electricity grid characteristics, via a mathematical optimisation problem. This is solved by exploiting marginal convexity in certain subspaces via alternating minimisation. The GSKs and PAs are then mapped to the PTDFs and RAMs, using the grid structure. Our reconstruction achieves in-sample relative errors of 22.3% and 15.9% for the PTDFs and RAMs respectively, while the out-of-sample ones are 25.4% and 18.1% respectively. We further show that our model outperforms the naive approach, and that the reconstructed GSKs and PAs recover specific structure.