August 27, 2020 - 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Eastern Time (ET)

Overcoming Challenges in Electricity Markets with High Shares of Variable Renewable Energy: New Research Insights

Event Description:

Electric power systems with high levels of variable renewable energy pose new challenges for market design. Organized electricity markets can deploy different bidding formats and pricing models to respond to these challenges and help market participants recover their short-term costs. Driven by the need to accommodate stringent decarbonization mandates, moreover, regulators are increasingly resorting to out-of-market approaches, for instance to promote energy storage.

In this webinar, the authors of two recent CEEPR Working Papers will describe how bidding formats and pricing models are evolving on both sides of the Atlantic to accommodate the operational constraints of renewable energy and energy storage providers, highlighting a number of lessons learned; and discuss the conditions under which competitive markets can ensure adequate investment in energy storage even without additional incentives.

This webinar is organized in collaboration with the MIT Energy Initiative Electric Power Systems Low Carbon Center.

Participants

Speaker:
Carlos Batlle
MIT

Carlos Batlle joined MITEI in 2011. Currently he heads the Regulation and Systems Analysis Group within the Electric Power Systems Low-Carbon Energy Center, leading research projects and supervising PhD and masters dissertations. He also teaches the course entitled “Engineering, Economics and Regulation of the Electric Power Sector” with Professor Pérez-Arriaga. He is an Associate Professor with Comillas Pontifical University’s Institute for Research in Technology (IIT) in Madrid, where he teaches Energy Economics and Electric Power Systems Regulation, and is Electricity Advisor of the Florence School of Regulation (FSR), an institution under the aegis of the European University in Florence, where he is the Director of the FSR Summer School on the Regulation of Energy Utilities.
Speaker:
Richard Schmalensee
MIT

Richard Schmalensee served as the John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management from 1998 through 2007. He was a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 through 1991 and served for 12 years as Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Professor Schmalensee is the author or coauthor of 11 books and more than 120 published articles, and he is co-editor of volumes 1 and 2 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization. His research has centered on industrial organization economics and its application to managerial and public policy issues, with particular emphasis on antitrust, regulatory, energy, and environmental policies. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, and numerous private corporations.
Moderator:
Christopher Knittel
MIT

Christopher Knittel is the George P Shultz Professor of Energy Economics and a Professor of Applied Economics in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He directs the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) at MIT. CEEPR, established in 1977 is the hub for social science work related to energy and the environment. Knittel is also the Deputy Director for Policy of the MIT Energy Initiative, the hub for energy research at MIT. Finally, along with Meredith Fowlie at UC Berkeley, he co-directs the Environmental and Energy Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Formerly, Knittel was on the faculty at UC Davis and Boston University. He is the former co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics, and an associate editor of the Journal of Transportation Economics and Policy, and Journal of Energy Markets, having previously served as an associate editor of The American Economic Journal — Economic Policy and The Journal of Industrial Economics.