Original Research on Power Markets
The following papers were written for the Power Markets Project or for other clients.
A Regional Power Market for the West: Risks and Benefits takes a fresh look at the pros and cons of creating a Western regional grid, and illuminates the complexities that have helped stall bills addressing the issue over the past three years. Grid regionalization could change how and where renewables are built, bought and sold, with ramifications for energy markets in California and across the West.
California's energy system is undergoing a radical transformation driven by disruptive technologies, consumer preferences, and aggressive clean energy policies. The old paradigm of central suppliers serving passive customers is giving way to a more decentralized and digitized system, with modular and smart technologies generating and controlling energy with greater efficiency and higher value.
Distributed energy resources (DERs) are small technologies — including rooftop solar, energy storage, microgrids, load control, energy efficiency, and communication and control technologies — that produce, store, manage, and reduce the use of energy. They are small enough to be “distributed” all around the grid, close to customers and away from centrally located power plants.
By Rachel Golden and Bentham Paulos
California is blazing a path to a low-carbon future through greater use of renewable electricity. But as wind and solar rapidly grow, grid operators are raising concerns about periods of over-generation and the specter of large amounts of curtailment. Curtailment is an easy response, but it is wasteful and undermines the investor confidence needed to transition the California power system. A host of supply-side and demand-side measures can keep curtailment to minimal levels, but policy reforms also are needed to make curtailment a viable tool. This paper appears in the July 2015 issue of Electricity Journal.
As renewable energy enters the mainstream, it is having significant impacts on electricity markets that were designed for conventional power sources. The pace of adoption for wind and solar power will hinge on whether market design policies can be changed to welcome them and accommodate their rapid growth. This paper appears in the December 2014 issue of Electricity Journal.
A power system with large amounts of wind and solar power requires flexibility to maintain reliability. While the flexibility toolbox is well-known to grid operators, policies and financial incentives to apply them to integrating renewables are sometimes lacking. This paper appeared in ElectricityPolicy.com.
As wind and solar power grow, they are changing the way grid operators view the power system. This paper, requested by ElectricityPolicy.com, describes the need to look at net demand -- gross demand minus production from wind and solar -- to understand the power system of the future. It is based on a presentation to the annual meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) in December 2014.
- Germany and Texas: Energy Twins?, in POWER Magazine.
These two market profiles provide basic facts about the Texas and PJM markets, along with a short summary of recent operational issues and policy debates.
PJM, the regional transmission organization (RTO) from the Mid-Atlantic region to Chicago, has been a world leader on demand response (DR). Demand response has been an integral part of their forward capacity markets since 2007, with greater activity than any other region.