Live From USAEE 2008
Here I am in New Orleans at the 2008 USAEE Conference. The conference program is available here. I shall report back as and when I can. if there is anything that particularly interests you that you’d like me to report on, please leave a comment.
on December 4th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Hope you’re attending the “Restructured Electricity Markets Discussion” this afternoon. If I were there, I’d ask the authors of the PJM-MISO congestion management paper if it is possible for either system to “export congestion” to the other by gaming the information exchanged (as for example asserted to be happening in the Nordic market in a paper by Glanchant and Pignon).
If it is possible, how would the other system operator be able to detect it?
on December 4th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I did attend that session, Mike. More on that elsewhere. Unfortunately I didn’t see your comment in time to ask the question at the time, but I did corner Alex Rudkevich before dinner. He hasn’t heard of the paper you mention, and neither have I, so we are not much help. Is it online anywhere?
However, I can offer this. After the paper Alex was asked if it was possible to make money out of the PJM-MISO interface in the same way as was allegedly done on the Lake Erie loop flow. His response was that in theory he believed that it was possible but if he knew how to do it in practice he would not be here talking to us.
on December 5th, 2008 at 11:03 am
I don’t think the Lake Erie scheduling trick (which, for example, allowed a power trader to avoid congestion costs between New York and PJM by scheduling a contract path around Lake Erie through Ontario and MISO) would be profitable, in part because of the way MISO and PJM coordinate and share information and in part because I don’t think the price differences are usually large enough to support the contract path changes.
Maybe the questioner had in mind some more subtle scheme to game the cross-border congestion management system. It is an interesting question.
on December 5th, 2008 at 11:16 am
The paper I referred to earlier:
Jean-Michel Glanchant and Virginie Pignon, “Nordic Electricity Congestion’s Arrangement as a Model for Europe: Physical Constraints or Operators’ Opportunity,” Cambridge-Electric Policy Research Group working paper series, EP20, 2003.
http://www.electricitypolicy.org.uk/pubs/index.html?paper=EP20&year=2003
on December 5th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Thanks Mike, I’ll try to get Alex to take a look at that.