The energy transition requires massive investments in low-carbon technologies—renewables, storage, green hydrogen, and flexible demand assets like data centers. However, whether these investments materialize hinges on the incentives faced by firms and households, which in turn depend on how electricity markets perform under evolving conditions. Today, regulators, investors, and policymakers lack robust tools to anticipate how market outcomes—such as prices, emissions, and investment profitability—will evolve under different scenarios. This information gap risks slowing the deployment of critical assets and misallocating public support.
NextENERGEIA addresses this need by developing a new software tool to simulate electricity market performance under various investment pathways and policy scenarios. Built on state-of-the-art game-theoretic models developed in the ERC project ELECTRIC CHALLENGES, the tool captures both competitive and strategic behavior of firms, models electricity markets at hourly resolution, and allows to assess investment decisions—features that are largely missing from existing tools.
In particular, NextENERGEIA is an accessible, modular, Python-based simulation engine that helps policymakers, firms, and researchers assess the private and social returns to low-carbon investments in electricity markets. The tool allows users to evaluate how different investment types (e.g. solar, storage, hydrogen) affect prices, emissions, and incentives, under current or hypothetical regulatory regimes.
The expected impact is threefold:
1. Policy relevance – Regulators and governments will gain a transparent, empirically grounded instrument to test reforms, design support schemes, and anticipate the economic effects of green investment policies.
2. Private decision-making – Investors and firms will be able to benchmark projects and forecast profitability under strategic market interactions.
3. Research and outreach – The tool will bridge the gap between academic modeling and applied policy work, offering open-access simulations and outputs adaptable across EU member states.
