The Italian Electricity Prices in Year 2025: an Agent-Based Simulation

In this paper, we build a realistic large-scale agent-based model of the Italian dayahead-electricity market based on a genetic algorithm and validated over several weeks of 2010, on the basis of exact historical data about supply, demand and network characteristics. A statistical analysis confirms that the simulator well replicates the observed prices. A future scenario for the year 2025 is then simulated, which takes into account market's evolution and energy vectors' price dynamics. The future electricity prices are contrasted with the ones that might arise considering also the possible (yet unlikely) construction of new nuclear power (NP) plants. It is shown that future prices will be higher than the actual ones. NP production can reduce the prices and their volatility, but the size of the impact depends on the pattern of the expected demand load, and can be negligible.