Day-ahead markets are a crucial tool for integrating more wind and solar into the electricity mix in the West, but it can be difficult to understand how they work in the abstract. On June 24-25, 2025, PESD Associate Director Mark Thurber conducted a remote workshop with 25 participants from the California Public Utilities Commission aiming to dive into these market concepts.

The workshop on day-ahead markets with renewable energy included live Energy Market Game simulations with participant teams managing generating companies. Teams bid into the game’s energy market and explored how transmission constraints, day-ahead markets, forward contracts, and high shares of renewables influenced their strategy.

Participants also completed PESD’s six e-learning modules before the workshop. These modules on Fixed and Variable Cost, Offer-Based Markets, Uniform-Price versus Pay-as-Bid Auctions, Unilateral Market Power, Transmission Constraints, and Genco Incentives with Forward Contracts help participants of different backgrounds come in with a similar base of knowledge and serve as a “textbook” participants can keep coming back to in the future.

This remote workshop concluded an initial series of four workshops with the CPUC, following previous in-person workshops in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This series is to be followed by an "advanced" workshop in the fall that is open to alumni of the first four workshops. This work is supported in part by PESD’s ongoing grant with Stanford Impact Labs, which seeks to empower regulators to translate the latest academic knowledge into regulatory policies that benefit consumers.