This is an advanced course on electricity markets, covering forward, spot, balancing and retail markets as well as policy interventions into those markets. Students will learn how to design and how to trade on such markets.
Electricity markets and the prices that emerge from trading on these markets drive the energy transition. It is traders, rather than power plant engineers, who decide which power station is dispatched. It is the prices that provide the incentives for investment and innovation and driving out (or not) polluting generators. It is the market that will ultimately determine if new energy technologies thrive or dive. But robust electricity market design is not only foundational for the energy transition, it is also foundational for energy poverty and for security of supply: In other industries, perverse incentives cause waste of resources, in electricity markets they can cause large-scale blackouts. Electricity market design is complicated, but too important to be left poorly understood.
This course is for 2nd year MIA, MPP and MDS students only.
Instructor
- Lion Hirth , Professor of Energy Policy
