Over the past two years, OATI collaborated with the California ISO and Western Energy Imbalance Market participants, led by PacifiCorp, to shape the newly-launched Extended Day-Ahead Market and create a platform to facilitate market participation.
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. – As the California ISO ushered in a new era of power grid management by launching the Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM) on May 1, OATI’s industry-leading energy trading and operations platform enabled the wholesale market’s first participant – PacifiCorp – to successfully begin market operations.
By the end of 2027, EDAM is expected to serve approximately 42 percent of Western electricity demand. Utilities across the region will benefit from the technical and operational feats achieved through the collaboration of PacifiCorp and OATI, the majority of which are in the process of deploying OATI’s platform, as well.
OATI webEDAM™ facilitates compliance with EDAM requirements and ensures seamless interaction between balancing authorities, scheduling coordinators, transmission providers, and the California ISO. The platform handles CAISO’s master file for resource and transmission modeling, transfer location modeling, system resource schedules, contract reference numbers and their association with transmission service requests, transmission ATC limits, resource sufficiency attributes, 5-minute schedule processing for system and transmission resources, balancing-authority shortfall calculation against e-Tags, and the full EDAM market awards and reports stream.
California ISO led stakeholder engagements throughout the two-year design of EDAM, which is an extension of the Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM). PacifiCorp, which was also the first utility to join the WEIM, also held an extensive stakeholder process with its transmission customers and stakeholders. The evolution of EDAM design required OATI developers and engineers to constantly adapt to new and altered technical requirements, often representing market participants in front of the California ISO.
“OATI worked closely and intensively with PacifiCorp’s EDAM Project Team, adapting to shifting requirements and evolving timelines, all while keeping unwavering focus on the ultimate goal—going live on time with full functionality,” said Rebekah Medford, PacifiCorp’s manager of market operations. “As the project moved forward, the scope of our internal work grew considerably, and we found ourselves with an additional challenge of developing an external customer portal. But OATI demonstrated impressive skill and flexibility in helping PacifiCorp ‘land the plane,’ ensuring that every detail was addressed and providing valuable assistance to both internal stakeholders and external customers.”
In addition to developing the EDAM solution, OATI updated webTrader™ to support CAISO’s Day-Ahead Market Enhancements (DAME), which added Imbalance Reserve commodities to the existing CAISO day-ahead market and went live simultaneously with EDAM. The module continues to handle the full range of CAISO market functionality: generation and load bids, convergence bids, inter-tie bids, energy and ancillary services, self-schedules, bid curves, inter-SC trades, and ETCs/TORs — with integrated pre-validation and automated reconciliation between e-Tags and inter-tie bids through OATI webSmartTag®.
“EDAM is one of the most ambitious wholesale market designs the U.S. has launched in a generation, and the platform work behind it has been a two-year exercise in building software against a protocol that was still being negotiated in CAISO’s stakeholder process,” said Dr. Sasan Mokhtari, President and CEO of OATI. “We are proud to be the platform partner that helped translate that design into operational reality.”
Full market coverage
OATI webTrader™ is a web-based energy trading and shadow settlement system for RTO market participants, covering physical and financial trading across MISO, PJM, ISO-NE, NYISO, IESO, SPP, CAISO and ERCOT.
Unified trading
OATI webTrader™ Power gives power marketers, merchant utility groups and generation operators one web-based system for financial and physical trading, with e-Tagging, scheduling and congestion management built in.
About OATI
Energy is all we do. From bulk energy markets to community microgrids, OATI serves every segment of the energy industry with essential technologies and services. At our core, we’re power systems engineers building better ways to move electrons across the grid.
We were the first company to provide large-scale software-as-a-service to the energy industry, and we pioneered the bulk power and DERMS markets. Today, we continue to push the energy frontier with cloud-based grid solutions and energy-native generative AI. Without compromising on security – for 30+ years, our private servers have safeguarded the energy industry’s data.
OATI was founded in 1995 by world-renowned power systems engineer Dr. Sasan Mokhtari, PhD. Privately owned for more than 30 years, OATI is an engineering-first organization that prides itself on leading the industry’s most robust research and development team, free from the pressure of venture capitalists and institutional investors. Learn more by visiting OATI.com or by contacting communications@oati.net.