Today we are starting the roll out of a substantial update to vSPD and its associated GDX files.
Since the advent of real-time pricing on 1 November 2022, a time-weighted average of the dispatch prices is used to calculate the price that each trading period is settled on. This occurs for both energy prices by node and reserve prices by island. Dispatch prices are typically derived from the RTD SPD schedules. But the PRSS schedule can also be the source of dispatch prices, especially for the first few minutes of a trading period.
Post 1 Nov 2022 daily GDX files
We currently produce and publish a GDX file for all PRSS and RTD case files. But not all PRSS and RTD schedules give rise to prices that are published as dispatch prices, which then go into the calculation of final prices. When we learn which schedules feed into final prices, we merge them into a single, daily GDX file and, starting today, are publishing them in folders by year going back to 1 November 2022. The daily GDX files will be published early each morning and will pertain to all trading periods from the preceding day, ie the file called Pricing_20231020.gdx will pertain to 20 October 2023 and will be published early on 21 October.
In a few weeks' time, we'll stop publishing the RTD and PRSS GDX files but will continue to publish all RTD and PRSS case files.
The new daily GDX files will only work with vSPD v5.0.0.
vSPD v5.0.0
In the next day or two, we will publish version 5.0.0 of vSPD. This release will represent a major update of vSPD that features many new innovations to simplify the replication of prices post real-time pricing and the undertaking of counterfactual analyses. Version 5.0.0 will only work with the daily GDX files dating back to 1 November 2022.
Version 4.0.0 will be deprecated as it will no longer serve any useful purpose. We made it available for users that wanted to solve vSPD following the start of real-time pricing but couldn't wait until we released v5.0.0. Version 4.0.0 requires the individual RTD or PRSS schedules, which, as noted above, we are soon going to stop publishing.
For analysis of dates preceding 1 November 2022, vSPD v3.1.0 should be used along with the old final pricing GDX files.
In the coming weeks, we will publish some Python code that allows an override GDX file to be created so that counterfactual experiments can be run using vSPD v5.0.0. Thereafter, we will work on a publicly available tool to replace vSPD online for dates since 1 November 2022.
