SUMMER INTERNSHIP AUTOMATES DATA PREPARATION FOR R&D NESTER’S MARKET SIMULATORS

Between 20 July and 28 August 2026, Madalena Ferreira, a Master’s student in Computational Engineering at the University of Aveiro, completed a summer internship at R&D Nester focused on developing automated processes for collecting, processing and structuring data from European electricity and flexibility markets. The work contributed to the continued development of R&D NESTER’s energy and system services market simulation tools.

During the internship, the input requirements of the energy and system services market simulators were analysed, together with the data made available by Gestore dei Mercati Energetici (GME) and ENTSO-E.

Based on this analysis, Python-based processes were developed to collect, validate and convert bids from the day-ahead, intraday and system services markets into formats compatible with R&D Nester’s simulation tools.

The solution allows users to select individual days, full months or custom date ranges, dynamically identify available market periods and bidding zones, process XLSX, CSV and XML files, remove duplicates, aggregate bids and record potential data retrieval failures.

XML templates based on the IEC 62325 standard, used to represent individual bids for services such as mFRR and aFRR, were also studied.

The processes were validated using historical data from the Portuguese, Spanish and Italian markets.

The work reduced the need for manual data preparation and established a more efficient, traceable and reproducible foundation for feeding the market simulators developed by R&D Nester.

Throughout the internship, Madalena Ferreira strengthened her knowledge and skills in electricity markets, Python programming, data engineering and validation, API integration, and the processing of different file formats.