On June 24 and 25, 2026, PESD Director Frank Wolak delivered an interactive energy market workshop with staff from Axia Energia in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

 The goal of the workshop was to give participants 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. Using PESD’s Energy Market Game, workshop participants formed teams of competing generating companies (“gencos”) operating in an administrative cost-based wholesale market and offer-based wholesale electricity market. 

Participants played games focusing on: (1) the exercise of unilateral market power by gencos in regions with and without transmission constraints, (2) incentives for genco offer behavior under uniform-price versus pay-as-bid auctions, (3) how fixed-price forward contracts for energy change the incentives of generation unit owners to exercise unilateral market power in the short-term market, (4) the impact of intermittent renewable energy on supplier behavior and market outcomes, (5) the incentives for inefficient offer behavior in zonal-pricing markets, (6) the benefits of physically feasible day-ahead and real-time markets, (7) the long-term resource adequacy challenges created by high shares of intermittent renewable energy in wholesale market, and (8) the relative effectiveness of capacity-based versus energy-contracting based approaches to ensuring long-term resource adequacy and reasonable short-term prices in a wholesale electricity market with significant intermittent renewables.