The executive course Electricity Markets is an introduction to economics, regulation, and industry practice of power markets.
Course content in a tweet
This is an advanced course on electricity markets: spot, balancing, forward, and retail. It is a course at the intersection of energy, economics and finance that focuses on public policy and regulation: how should power markets be designed with security of supply and social welfare in mind?
The significance of electricity 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 they drive 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.
Topics
After reviewing economic models of price setting in electricity markets (Merit Order Model and Screening Curve Model) and price drivers (fuel and carbon markets, weather), we will study short-term electricity markets that drive plant dispatch: spot markets, imbalance settlement and balancing reserve auctions. In the second half of the course, we will study the long-term investment incentives: financial markets and capacity mechanism. We will also discuss alternative ways to give electricity markets spatial granularity (zonal pricing, nodal pricing) and study retail markets. While this course is centered around European markets, in the last session we will contrast this to US market design.
Target group
We welcome energy analysts and decision makers in industry, policy making, and society who want to deepen their analytical understanding of European electricity systems, energy policy, and power markets. The course is designed for energy experts in federal and state ministries, regulatory agencies, utility companies, electricity retail suppliers, distribution and transmission operators, commodity trading houses, financial institutions, renewable energy and battery project developers, energy-intensive industry, trade associations, think tanks, and NGO. It is suited for experienced energy analysts as well as new entrants to the sector.
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