The U.S. Department of Energy on Nov. 20 unveiled funding for up to a total of just under $10 million for six projects aimed at improving state and regional engagement in wholesale electricity markets.
The Wholesale Electricity Market Studies and Engagement (WEMSE) Program provides funding to states and regions related to developing, expanding, or improving wholesale electricity markets.
Administered by DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, the WEMSE program provides technical and financial assistance to help ensure stakeholders are able to provide insight into market design, expansion, and improvement activities, including interregional transmission infrastructure development.
These six projects will receive up to a combined total of just under $10 million in funding to identify and implement market improvements.
- Boise State University ($2 million) will analyze ways to improve resource adequacy in the Southwest Power Pool region. Boise State University and SPP will develop and explore how to develop and apply new resource adequacy measures and metrics that improve upon the current practice of setting planning reserve margins based on loss of load expectation. The project will support the implementation of more modern resource adequacy metrics, reliability standards, and planning criteria in an independent system operator/Regional Transmission Organization environment using SPP as the case study.
- GE Vernova Advanced Research Center ($1.3 million) will work with project partners to develop mechanisms to incorporate distributed energy resource aggregators (DERAs) more efficiently into wholesale market security-constrained unit commitment and to improve market run times. The project team will test DERA market participation models, study their impact on distribution grids, and improve distribution grid reliability and market clearing speed to enable more DERAs to bid into wholesale markets, particularly in the ISO New England and PJM Interconnection markets.
- Global Impact, LLC’s West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative ($1 million) will convene stakeholders and potential market participants to develop a regional organization that can provide independent, multi-state governance of a Western wholesale market. The Pathways Initiative team is convening stakeholders from all of the states in the Western Interconnection.
- Quanta Technology ($1.5 million) will research the integration of long-duration energy storage in the California Independent System Operator and the New York Independent System Operator markets.
- Temple University ($1.5 million) will study coordination between PJM and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator with the new Predictive and Adaptive Market-to-Market Coordination for Efficient Congestion Relief (PACER) system. The PACER system will analyze credible scenarios, including worst-case scenarios, at the PJM/MISO seam with different levels of electrification, renewable penetration, and weather conditions across the two markets and develop a useable joint-operating model for RTO/ISO staff.
- University of Pittsburgh ($2.7 million) will develop a framework for shared resource adequacy planning within and between regions to support joint studies and operational procedures during extreme weather events. The University of Pittsburgh project will study SPP and MISO to determine better ways of coordinating scheduling, managing congestion, improving forecasting accuracy to reduce transaction costs, and improving intertie optimization between SPP and MISO. Better coordination of interties between SPP and MISO will improve resource adequacy in both markets by helping the markets share resources more effectively.
Private industry and national labs that receive funding through this program are required to collaborate with a state or regional system operator, or a coalition of states or regional market operators. WEMSE funding supports studies, convenings, education, and analysis but does not support hard infrastructure development or tools.
Learn more about the Grid Deployment Office.
