Opportunities in Power Market Design: Wind Power, Capacity Markets, Optimization Software

Michael Giberson

A handful of stories raising power market design issues:

The Oregonian, “Northwest wind power to double but inconsistency creates nightmare“: “The value of BPA’s surplus power sales are already being undermined by wind energy sloshing into the market. That ultimately increases rates for its public utility customers, who are loathe to absorb any additional costs incurred by BPA for integrating wind output that isn’t serving them.”

Naturlig Energi, “Who owns the wind?“: “The valuation authority has agreed to take on the two Danish cases, not because it will accept ownership of the wind but because a wind turbine is considered real estate, and because a wind turbine, if the wind is influenced by new turbines, actually loses value.”

Next 100, “Who owns the wind?” (commenting on the prior item): “…as wind power developers dot the landscape with giant turbines, litigation is growing all over the world not just with NIMBY neighbors, but also with rival developers to answer the novel question: who owns the wind?”

News release, “Brattle study shows positive outlook for long-term sustainability of Alberta’s energy-only electricity market“: “The report analyzes a number of challenges to resource adequacy that the Alberta energy-only market will face over the coming decade … [but] concludes, however, that the current market design is generally well-functioning and should be able to support this higher and more challenging rate of generation additions, as long as large simultaneous retirements can be avoided.”

California ISO, “Compliance filing in Docket No. ER11-2256-000“: On December 1, 2010, the ISO proposed modifications to the California ISO Tariff to implement the Capacity Procurement Mechanism (CPM) to replace the expiring Interim Capacity Procurement Mechanism (ICPM) as the backstop mechanism that authorizes the ISO to procure capacity to address a deficiency or supplement resource adequacy (RA) procurement by Load Serving Entities (LSEs) as needed in order to comply with applicable reliability criteria and maintain reliability of the grid. The compliance filing responds to FERC’s March 17 order in the docket.

FERC Technical Conference, “Increasing market and planning efficiency through improved software“: “Take notice that Commission staff will convene a technical conference on June 28-30, 2011, from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM, to discuss opportunities for increasing real-time and day-ahead market efficiency through improved software. This conference will bring together diverse experts from ISOs/RTOs, non-market utilities, the software industry, government, research centers and academia for the purposes of stimulating discussion and sharing of information about the technical aspects of these issues and identifying fruitful avenues for research.” (From official notice.)

(HT to Eric S. for pointing out the Alberta study.)