A New Swing-Contract Design For Wholesale Power Markets

This book reconsiders the current design of wholesale electric power markets in view of these concerns. Four design principles are stressed: (i) Wholesale electric power markets must necessarily be forward markets due to the speed of real-time operations; (ii) Only one type of product can effectively be offered in a wholesale electric power market: namely, reserve, an insurance product offering availability of net-load balancing services during future real-time operations; (iii) Net-load balancing services offered into wholesale electric power markets primarily take the form of power paths that can be dispatched over time at specific grid locations; (iv) All dispatchable resources should be permitted to compete for the provision of power paths without regard for irrelevant underlying technological differences. If these four principles are accepted, current trade and settlement arrangements for wholesale electric power markets need to be fundamentally altered.