Power System Economics and Electricity Markets

Catalog description

This graduate-level course covers the fundamentals of power systems economics and electricity markets, emphasizing the application of microeconomics and optimization tools. The course introduces basic microeconomic concepts in the context of retail and wholesale electricity markets: consumer preference, consumer choice, production costs and profit maximization, individual and market demand and supply functions, competitive markets and equilibria, welfare optimization, market power, monopoly and price discrimination, regulated monopoly and utility pricing. The course covers electricity market design: energy markets, reserve markets, ancillary service markets, capacity markets, ancillary service markets, scarcity pricing, capacity markets, financial transmission rights, inter-regional transaction markets, and virtual transaction markets. Advanced topics on distributed energy resources and energy aggregation are discussed and assigned as part of class projects.