On May 28 and 29, PESD Director Frank Wolak, Stanford Graduate Student Nils Angliviel de La Beaumelle, and Nicolas Astier of the Paris School of Economics conducted a workshop on electricity market design and monitoring for more than thirty staff members at the Commission de Régulation de l’Énergie (CRE), the French Energy regulator.

The goal of the workshop was to provide participants with hands-on experience with the principles underlying wholesale electricity market design and operation, with a focus on concepts that are relevant to achieving long-term resource adequacy in a market with high shares of intermittent renewable energy from wind and solar generation units and single dominant generation unit owner.

Participants learned about the following topics using PESD's Energy Market Game: (1) the exercise of unilateral market power by suppliers with and without finite transmission capacity connecting demand and supply regions, (2) supplier offer behavior under a uniform-price versus a pay-as-bid auction mechanism, (3) how fixed-price and fixed-quantity forward financial contracts for energy change the incentives of generation unit owners to exercise unilateral market power in the short-term energy market, (4) the impact of intermittent renewable energy from wind and solar generation resources on supplier behavior and market outcomes, (5) the long-term resource adequacy challenges created by high shares of intermittent renewable energy in wholesale market, and (5) the relative effectiveness of different approaches to ensuring long-term resource adequacy and workably competitive short-term prices in a wholesale electricity market with a single supplier with a large market share.