Project description
Watching over fair play in power markets
Electricity keeps modern life running (from factories and hospitals to homes), but its production and trade are highly complex and vulnerable to manipulation. When powerful energy companies distort markets, the effects ripple across entire economies and drive up prices for consumers. The ERC-funded e-Hawk project aims to change that by developing an AI-powered tool that automatically detects unusual patterns in electricity supply and pricing. Using only publicly available data and advanced functional statistics, the system learns to spot and explain market irregularities in real time. The goal is to give regulators a smart, efficient way to ensure transparency, fairness, and protection for all energy users.
Objective
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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-POC
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
29016 MALAGA
Spain
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.