Electricity Market Design
For regulators, RTO/ISO staff, market participants, and energy traders. What wholesale markets must do differently when generation is variable, demand is flexible, DERs participate at scale, and large new loads come online faster than planners can model them. Includes work on FERC Order 2222, the California duck curve, and electricity price forecasting.
What this frontier is about
The U.S. electricity market is being remade by a confluence of architectural, technological, and socio-economic forces. Variable renewable generation is climbing, environmental regulation is tightening, infrastructure is aging, fuel economics are shifting, cybersecurity demands are growing, and customer load growth — once the engine of utility earnings — has gone flat or negative in many service territories. Utilities are caught in the middle: they need to deploy capital at an accelerated rate while their traditional revenue base erodes underneath them. Wholesale markets, capacity constructs, and ratemaking frameworks built in the 1990s have to absorb all of this simultaneously — without the system going down and without stranding the investments still required to keep it running.
This frontier is where I work on the rules of the market itself.
How I work in this area
Utility 2.0 and the redesign of wholesale markets. The transition from a centralized, dispatchable, vertically integrated industry to a distributed, variable, customer-participating one requires new market structures: capacity accreditation that reflects what resources actually contribute during stress hours, locational pricing that values flexibility, FERC Order 2222–compliant frameworks for DER aggregation, and capacity markets that don't paradoxically penalize the resources doing the most useful work. My published research examines distributed grid architectures, real-time monitoring and verification, microgrid deployment, smart-meter and smart-grid investment, and the data analytics that incentivize efficient market design and grid flexibility.
Energy forecasting and anomaly detection. Markets are only as good as the signals they produce, and signals are only useful if you can read them through the noise. My work on California Independent System Operator (CAISO) price forecasting and anomaly detection focuses on separating real congestion, scarcity, and curtailment from artifacts and outliers — giving traders, planners, and regulators sharper visibility into what wholesale markets are actually doing.
Carbon markets and emissions-pricing mechanisms. Wholesale electricity market reform increasingly intersects with carbon markets, emissions regulation, and environmental finance. My review work on carbon finance and environmental commodity markets examines the application of market-based instruments to incentivize the behavior and change needed to deliver environmental quality and price environmental risk.
Customer choice, business models, and the “solar cities” strategy. My research applies a smart-cities lens to U.S., European, and Asian markets to examine infrastructure networks, revenue models, customer interface, organizational mandate, and value proposition in the new utility business model regime. The Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) work in New York is the deepest example of this thread.
My selected publications and thought leadership in this frontier
Books and chapters
Diversifying Electricity Customer Choice: REVing Up the New York Energy Vision for Polycentric Innovation— IntechOpen, 2018
Smart Energy Frameworks for Smart Cities: The Need for Polycentrism — Springer Handbook of Smart Cities -2021
Sustainable Energy Investment: Technical, Market and Policy Innovations to Address Risk— co-edited with Dr. John Byrne, IntechOpen, 2021
Smart Energy Frameworks for Smart Cities: The Need for Polycentrism— Springer Handbook of Smart Cities, 2021
Introductory Chapter: Sustainable Energy Investment and the Transition to Renewable Energy-Powered Futures— IntechOpen, 2021
Recent research and applied work
Reviews and analytical commentary
Book Review: Carbon Finance: How Carbon and Stock Markets Are Affected by Energy Prices and Emissions Regulations— Energy Journal, 2017
Book Review: Environmental Finance and Investments — Financial Analysts Journal, 2016
Book Review: Economics of Unconventional Shale Gas Development: Case Studies and Impacts — Energy Journal, 2015
For the full archive, see Publications →
What this means for regulators, market participants, and System Operators
If you're a regulator, the question is how to update market rules fast enough to keep pace with the resources entering the system without inviting the gaming, free-ridership, or reliability shortfalls that come from bad market design. If you're at an ISO or RTO, the question is how to operationalize FERC Order 2222 and DER aggregation without overwhelming your existing settlement and dispatch systems. If you're a market participant, the question is how to read the signal through the noise — and how to position assets in a market whose rules are still being rewritten in real time.
