On March 11 and 12, 2026, PESD Associate Director Mark Thurber taught a workshop on Day-Ahead Markets hosted by the Western Interstate Energy Board in Bozeman, Montana.

As electricity markets become regionalized across the WECC, policymakers and regulators increasingly need to understand how these markets work, even if their own state or province does not yet have a formal market. 

In this Energy Market Game-based, in-person workshop, participants had the chance to put into practice the concepts they explored with Stanford PESD’s e-learning modules by playing the roles of generating companies offering into wholesale electricity markets. Given the planned expansion of regional day-ahead markets in the West, the games focused in particular on how day-ahead markets work, how they can be of particular value in a grid with significant wind and solar, and how to avoid possible pitfalls in the design of a regional day-ahead market. We also examined the role fixed-price forward contracts for energy, which function analogously to day-ahead markets but on a longer timescale, can play in ensuring long-term resource adequacy. 

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