The Wind Solar Alliance (WSA, formerly the Wind Energy Foundation) is working in partnership with the American Wind Energy Association and Solar Energy Industries Association on a research and educational campaign called A Renewable America (ARA). As part of this effort, WSA hired a team assembled by Grid Strategies LLC (GS) to research and offer recommendations on how wholesale electric power markets should be designed to foster a reliable, affordable and clean electric system given current trends in energy technologies and economics. WSA also asked the GS team to recommend paths toward that improved market design within the PJM and MISO regions. The resulting paper (link below) offers recommendations for how to update wholesale electric market rules to better serve customers’ and regulators’ desire for clean, affordable electricity. These recommendations seek to align wholesale market rules more closely with several considerations: the growing demand for clean, low-cost renewable generation, energy efficiency and distributed generation; the need for reliable, affordable electricity necessitated by a challenging global economy; and federal and state mandates requiring fair, non-discriminatory opportunities for all providers, technologies and customers.

The reforms recommended in the report will produce four highly beneficial features: markets that are flexible, fair, far, and free.

FLEXIBILITY refers to a power system able to respond and adapt to changes in uncontrollable or non-dispatchable factors such as consumption (load), wind speed, solar insolation, other generator output deviations, forced generation outages and transmission disruptions.

FAIR markets will be designed around service requirements and performance capabilities and be fuel-neutral and technology agnostic, without inappropriately advantaging or penalizing customers or resources.

FAR markets will have a broad geographic span, to maximize the efficiency benefits of supply and demand diversity, reducing variability of resources by netting them out against each other. It will expand deliverability options between resources and customers and will operate seamlessly with RTOs expanding their geographic scope.

FREE markets facilitates customer choice and do not raise barriers to market entry and exit. It should also support customers’, states’, and local authorities’ ability to act on choices about how to balance between goals such as least cost, distributed versus centralized, environmental impact, local and in-state development, and other priorities.

In summary the Report recommends a market that attracts flexible resources, including demand response and storage, through open participation and efficient market pricing; reduces inappropriate compensation and commitment of inflexible units; allows renewable resources to participate in all reliability services markets; and respects resource choices by states without mitigation.

The Report can be found at https://w3.windfair.net/wind-energy/pr/30024-report-electricity-grid-ren....