Instructor Bio
Taught by: Professor Ross Baldick
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Texas Austin
Course Description
- This course focuses on the "locational marginal pricing" model of "organized" or "centralized" day-ahead and real-time electricity markets, which is in place in the Eastern United States, in the Midwest United States, California, and most recently in Texas (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT) from December 2010. The material uses the ERCOT market as its main example, but features of other North American markets, such as capacity markets, are also discussed. We will consider the solution of power flow, formulate optimal dispatch as an optimization problem, consider offer-based economic dispatch, transmission and unit commitment issues, and discuss pricing rules and incentives in markets, particularly in the context of transmission limits. The pedagogical approach is to first discuss pricing in organized electricity markets in the absence of transmission constraints and then introduce transmission constraints and their implications. We will also discuss a number of other topics including energy and transmission price risk hedging, network models, and capacity adequacy.
- This course covers technical topics in power systems, optimization, and economics at a graduate level and is presented in a mathematically rigorous fashion. A challenge in such a course is that few students will have background in all of these areas, and different students will have different backgrounds. Typical students should have at least an undergraduate technical background in at least two of these areas and expect to read outside of the class for any background material that they have not studied prior to this class. The first third of the semester will rapidly review the materials.