Zero is the easiest level to model
The difference between commodity/energy markets and financial ones is that you need to know a
lot more about the thing you are modelling. Dollars or shares can be moved in an instant to or from anywhere, and dollars are all the same, oil is not.
Equities can be stored, energy rarely can.
All of that should be obvious and known to you, but it illustrates that what you need to work on in parallel with the standard maths is the mechanics of production and distribution. For instance Germany has far more investment in alt energy than Britain, but Britain ha a better electricity grid and has more non-carbon energy than most European states as well as more oil.
Grids are a big issue since most were built to handle a small number of "dense" energy plants near where it is consumed.
Alt energy is often made far from its consumption and is far more spread out.
So being wise in the way of grids will help a lot.
I chose grids first because they are independent of the energy source, be it wind, geothermal, waste etc and it avoids you having to bet your career on a source that may not turn out to be important. Since alt energy is now one of the biggest centres of bullshit in finance, you can't trust
anyone who says "x will be the dominant source" or even that it will be useful in ten years.
Grids are also important to trading, so I'm confident that this will have value.
Also of course each of the alt energy sources has flaws mostly in producing energy when we don't want it, ie photovoltaic only works in the day, and the correlation between wind and baseline energy consumption is shit. So a good area for serious math modelling is those correlations, although it is not my area I see a strong relationship between hedging a portfolio and constructing a set of sources which when combined will provide a mildly reliable stream of power. However for any source you must be wise in modelling the distributioin of events when it cannot deliver. Many types of windmill can't cope with too much wind, as well as too little, waste to be burned into power actually fluctuates a lot, and the sun don't always shine on me.
