Electricity governance and the Western energy imbalance market in the United States: The necessity of interorganizational collaboration

RTO Governance Structures Can Affect Capacity Market Outcomes

“…The potential connection between RTO governance and market performance was first raised by Dworkin and Goldwasser [5] but has received more attention in the past few years [6][7][8][9]. We add to this growing literature on RTO governance by providing more direct and quantitative evidence of a relationship between RTO governance and market outcomes.…”

The Political Complexity of Regional Electricity Policy Formation

“…As large-scale electric power systems undergo various types of technological transition, including the integration of large amounts of renewable power generation and an increase in adoption of distributed power generation and electrification of transportation, the rules that govern markets, planning, and operations of the power grid need to adapt along with technology [1][2][3][4][5][6]. These rules are important for determining the value of technology options that explicitly or implicitly compete to provide electric generation and transmission services [7].…”

“…In the United States, grid operators have adapted to rapid growth in wind energy by changing market and 2 Complexity generator dispatch rules to minimize the frequency with which wind energy output must be curtailed [5] and have adopted new power transmission planning procedures aimed at finding synergies between wind energy development and other electric transmission needs [8]. In California, growth in solar energy has challenged that state's power grid to be able to balance the rapid decline in solar output that occurs at the end of the daytime period with a coincident increase in demand [4]. The response of the California grid operator has been to establish a new market construct for "imbalance energy" services that are able to increase and decrease output quickly in response to changes in state electricity demand or solar power production.…”

“…The necessity of power grid operators to adapt planning and operational rules to handle the increased penetration of renewable energy or other technologies on the electric power system is clear, but an underappreciated aspect of this adaptation is that in many jurisdictions the market, planning, and operational rules are made in a collective decision process requiring coordination and negotiation among multiple parties rather than by a government or other central authority [7]. The process of integration of renewable energy or distributed energy resources into largescale power grids is thus not simply a problem of engineering and technology but is a complex sociotechnical process in which the process for enacting changes in the rules governing power grid planning and operations can have a measurable impact on grid performance after the rule changes have been made [4,7,9].…”

“…In contrast to the large literature that has used models of distributed decision-making or multiagent models to analyze the impacts of consumer or distributed energy decisions on power grid operations (examples from this voluminous literature include [7,[10][11][12][13][14]), the analysis of how regional power grid operators make decisions has emerged only recently. This literature has largely focused on the governance of regional power grid operators and the relationship between these grid operators and their regulators [2,4,15,16]. Particularly in the United States, however, the rules governing the operation and planning of regional power grids are made in a stakeholderdriven setting that resembles a negotiated political process more than a regulatory process (although the stakeholderdriven proceedings will typically end with the regulatory approving or disapproving of the rule changes supported by the stakeholder group) [17,18].…”