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The integration of renewable power supplies into existing electrical grids, or other major technology transitions in electric power, is a complex sociotechnical process. While the technical challenges are well-understood, the process of adapting electricity policy and market rules to these new technologies is understudied. Planning and market rules are a critical determinant of the technical success of renewable energy integration efforts and the financial viability of renewable energy investments. Organizational adaptation can be particularly complex in electric power, where transmission grids cross multiple political boundaries and decisions are made not by central authorities or governments, but in cooperative regional frameworks that must accommodate many divergent interests. We add to a recently emerging literature on the governance of regional organizations that plan and operate electric power grids by developing and illustrating a novel approach to the study of political power in multistakeholder electricity organizations. We use semistructured interviews with participants in a specific regional electric grid authority, the PJM Regional Transmission Operator in the Mid-Atlantic United States, to elicit perceptions of where tensions arise in stakeholder-driven processes for changing PJM's rules and perceptions of those groups of stakeholders that possess political power. We treat these perceptions as hypotheses that can be evaluated empirically using five years of data from PJM on how stakeholders voted on a wide variety of regional electricity policy issues. Representing voting behavior as a network, we use a community detection method to identify strong coalitions of stakeholders in PJM that provide support for some stakeholder perceptions of political power and refute other perceptions. The degree distribution of the voting network exhibits a fat tail relative to those in other canonical graph models. We show, using relatively simple network metrics including degree, betweenness, and the mixing parameter, that the reason for this fat tail in the degree distribution is the existence of "swing" voters in RTO stakeholder networks. These voters are identifiable in the tail of the degree distribution of the voting network and are influential in pushing highly contentious rule change proposals towards passage or failure. The method we develop is generalizable to other contexts and provides a new framework for the study of regional electricity policy formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many important electricity policy initiatives would directly affect the operation of electric power networks. This paper develops a method for estimating short-run zonal supply curves in transmission-constrained electricity markets that can be implemented quickly by policy analysts with training in statistical methods and with publicly available data. Our model enables analysis of distributional impacts of policies affecting operation of electric power grid. The method uses fuel prices and zonal electric loads to determine piecewise supply curves, identifying zonal electricity price and marginal fuel. We illustrate our methodology by estimating zonal impacts of Pennsylvania's Act 129, an energy efficiency and conservation policy. For most utilities in Pennsylvania, Act 129 would reduce the influence of natural gas on electricity price formation and increase the influence of coal. The total resulted savings would be around 267 million dollars, 82 percent of which would be enjoyed by the customers in Pennsylvania. We also analyze the impacts of imposing a $35/ton tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Our results show that the policy would increase the average prices in PJM by 47–89 percent under different fuel price scenarios in the short run, and would lead to short-run interfuel substitution between natural gas and coal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flow regime of rivers is a complex but important measure of environmental quality and one that can be significantly impacted by conventional hydropower generation. While traditional hydropower scheduling creates a periodicity in downstream flows corresponding to seasonal and daily electricity demand patterns, deregulated electricity markets may provide financial incentives to further alter flows, as utilities respond to hourly market dynamics. This study investigates the potential for deregulated markets to impact both a hydropower utility's revenue stream and downstream flow regimes. Six operating scenarios are explored: (1-2) full-market participation (including real-time energy), with and without flow reregulation; (3) day-ahead market only; and (4-6) run-of-river operations (ROR), with and without flood control and flow reregulation. Results suggest that, relative to a day-ahead-only scenario, the scale of any differences in flow regime resulting from full-market participation is relatively small compared to the additional revenue-generating potential of such a strategy. Implementing a run-of-river policy frequently yields "more natural" flow regimes than the day-ahead only scenario; but, in some cases these improvements are modest, and in others the ROR scenarios exacerbate deviation from unregulated flows. Regardless, the effects of implementing an ROR strategy come at a substantial cost in terms of foregone hydropower revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restructuring efforts in the U.S. electric power sector have tried to encourage transmission investment by independent (non-utility) transmission companies, and have promoted various levels of market-based transmission investment. Underlying this shift to "merchant" transmission investment is an assumption that new transmission infrastructure can be classified as providing a congestion-relief benefit or a reliability benefit. In this paper, we demonstrate that this assumption is largely incorrect for meshed interconnections such as electric power networks. We focus on a particular network topology known as the Wheatstone network to show how congestion and reliability can represent tradeoffs. Lines that cause congestion may be justified on reliability grounds. We decompose the congestion and reliability effects of a given network alteration, and demonstrate their dependence through simulations on a 118- bus test network. The true relationship between congestion and reliability depends critically on identifying the relevant range of demand for evaluating any network externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]