Reliability-Based Competition in Wholesale Electricity: Legal and Policy Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I. INTRODUCTION The August 14, 2003 blackout, which affected more than fifty million Americans and Canadians, has breathed a sense of urgency into a lingering debate: what mix of federal electricity policies will provide both excellent reliability and well-functioning wholesale markets? This article tackles that question by advocating the implementation of the six policies set out below. The thesis of this article is that implementation of the following key federal policies would provide substantial consumer benefits by significantly enhancing both bulk power reliability and vibrant wholesale competition. These policies are: 1) mandatory reliability standards; 2) the independent regional grid manager; 3) locational marginal pricing (LMP); 4) resource adequacy requirements, including demand response programs; 5) competitive wholesale procurement; and 6) transmission infrastructure investment. These elements have been proposed and debated for several years. The organized wholesale markets grappled with and implemented a number of them. Except with respect to mandatory reliability standards and transmission investment, which have an obvious reliability rationale, most federal electricity policies are advocated or challenged in the context of a debate over which market elements will facilitate robust competition. In contrast, the reliability benefits of the pro-market proposals we discuss herein have often occupied a back seat in the debate. This article shines a spotlight on the considerable reliability benefits of these policies. For a quarter of a century, there has been a steady, if somewhat uneven, evolution toward competitive wholesale electricity markets in the United States. An early catalyst was the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA),1 which was followed by the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct).2 Sensing a green light from Congress for an aggressive electric restructuring policy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) promulgated the transmission open access rules in Order No. 888.3 A few years later, in Order No. 2000, the FERC encouraged transmission owners to form independent grid management entities such as Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs).4 The Commission has not finalized its proposed standard market design (SMD),5 a more aggressive and controversial restructuring step. However, the Commission continues to promote, on a region-by-region basis, an industry structure and market rules largely consistent with fundamental SMD principles.6 Although there have been setbacks in the FERC's march toward well-structured wholesale electricity markets, and there is sharp disagreement over how to define and achieve this goal,8 it is likely that supply competition, rather than cost-of-service regulation, will remain the policy favored by both Congress and the FERC for the foreseeable future. There is every indication that the Commission adheres to its fundamental belief that customers will benefit from a market-based approach,9 and pending energy legislation extols the virtues of well-structured wholesale electricity markets to serve the public interest.10 At the same time, concern about reliability has grown. The Final Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout in the United States and Canada (Blackout Report)11 was published after a comprehensive investigation by government officials and reliability experts from both countries. While the Blackout Report did not cite wholesale competition as a cause for the cascading outage,12 the blackout's origination at a utility within the geographic region of the Midwestern Independent System Operator (MISO) caused some observers to question whether competitive wholesale markets are compatible with a highly reliable bulk power system. Some expressed concern that the trend toward partial disaggregation of generation from transmission breaks a necessary planning and operational link, resulting in diminished reliability. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".