The intersection of autonomous vehicles, ride sharing and transportation electrification could have significant implications for electric utilities. This paper analyses how the development of shared autonomous electric vehicles may make electrified transportation more likely and why this may lead to a more rapid than expected shift in the current transportation paradigm. We also discuss how these trends may affect utilities and suggest what they can do to prepare for the transition

The article examines the potential impacts of new mobility services such as ride sharing and ride hailing on the speed and depth of electrification of personal transportation. The article explores how a shift of transportation towards shared mobility services might accelerate electrification of transportation if mobility service providers switch to EVs more rapidly than individual car owners.

The articles describes 100% renewable/clean energy systems and argues that they may be less costly and easier to achieve than is often argued in the industry.

Marginal-cost-based dynamic pricing of electric· ity services, including real power, reactive power, and reserves, may provide unprecedented efficiencies and system synergies that are pivotal to the sustainability of massive re· newable generation integrat ion. Extension of wholesale high-voltage power markets to allow distribution network connected prosumers to participate, albeit desirable, has stalled on high transaction costs and the lack of a tractable market clearing framework. This paper presents a distributed, massively parallel architecture that enables tractable transmission and distribution locational marginal price (T&DLMP) discovery along with optimal scheduling of centralized generation, decentralized conventional and flexible loads, and distributed energy resources (DERs). DERs include distributed generation; electric vehicle (EV) battery charging and storage; heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) and c:ombined heat & power (CHP) microgenerators; computing; volt/var control devices; grid-friendly applianc:es; smart transformers; and more. The proposed iterative distributed architecture can discover T&DLMPs while capturing the full c:omplexity of each participating DER's intertemporal preferences and physical system dynamics.

Electricity market manipulation enforcement actions have moved from conventional analysis of generator market power in real-time physical markets to material allegations of sustained crossproduct price manipulation in forward financial markets. A major challenge is to develop and apply forward market analytical frameworks and models. This task is more difficult than for the real-time market. An adaptation of cross-product manipulation models from cash-settled financial markets provides an existence demonstration under uncertainty and asymmetric information. The implications of this analysis include strong empirical predictions about necessary randomized strategies that are not likely to be observed or sustainable in electricity markets. Absent these randomized strategies and other market imperfections, the means for achieving sustained forward market price manipulation remains unexplained.

Keywords: market manipulation; electricity markets; limits to arbitrage; asymmetric information

Excerpt from the Introduction:

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this technical conference. My comments here and during the conference are my own and do not represent the opinions of anyone else. The focus of my remarks will be on carbon pricing and the interactions with short-term electricity markets as found in the organized wholesale markets in the United States. I do not address the design and implementation questions focused on investments and resource adequacy that underpin capacity markets.

—The presence of non-convexities in electricity markets has been an active research area for about two decades. The — inevitable under current marginal cost pricing — problem of guaranteeing that no truthful-bidding market participant incurs losses in the day-ahead (DA) market is addressed in current practice through make-whole payments a.k.a. uplift. Alternative pricing rules have been studied to deal with this problem. Among them, Convex Hull (CH) prices associated with minimum uplift have attracted significant attention. Several US Independent System Operators (ISOs) have considered CH prices but resorted to approximations, mainly because determining exact CH prices is computationally challenging, while providing little intuition about the price formation rational. In this paper, we describe CH price estimation problem by relying on DantzigWolfe decomposition and Column Generation. Moreover, the approach provides intuition on the underlying price formation rational. A test bed of stylized examples elucidate an exposition of the intuition in the CH price formation. In addition, a realistic ISO dataset is used to suggest scalability and validate the proof-of-concept.

This article examines how the cost of transmission of power is to be incorporated in the utilities ratebase in a competitive bulk power market. The topics include a call for public discussion and debate, who should bear the risk of residual revenue responsibility for transmission assets, are actual costs and uses reflected in the allocation of responsibility for transmission revenues, and how can transmission pricing be used to reduce the likelihood of anti-competitive behavior by those entities owning both generation and transmission facilities.

The recently passed Energy Policy Act has intensified the need to resolved long-standing problems between federal and state regulatory systems. Various means of coordination are open but benefits will be lost if we don't get moving.

The difference between the pricing of transmission services for retail customers and the
pricing for wholesale customers could hardly be more striking.. Retail customers still pay
for transmission in exactly the same way that they have done for generations, namely through bundled retail rates. There are no unbundled retail transmission tariffs as such. Rates are based on the classic, time-honored methodology of cost of service regulation, namely capital investment minus depreciation times rate of return, plus expenses. The rate is then adjusted to account for customer class differences.

With one or two possible exceptions related to future transmission services, wholesale
customers generally pay, or at least have the option to choose to pay, an unbundled,
transmission-specific rate and then choose their supplier from the marketplace. The
transmission price will at least reflect the discrete costs of providing transmission-specific
services or, depending on the pricing system employed in the locality the service is being
rendered, may well be reflective of all costs actually being incurred on the system, including
congestion costs. In short, transmission-specific price signals are, with a few possible
exceptions, given solely to wholesale customers. They are not conveyed to retail customers
either directly or indirectly.

The essay sets out what electric markets might look like if the pricing proposed in value of solar studies were adopted for every resource.