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Dynamic Testing of Wholesale Power Market Designs: An Open-Source Agent-Based Framework

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Abstract

In April 2003 the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a complicated market design—the Wholesale Power Market Platform (WPMP)—for common adoption by all US wholesale power markets. Versions of the WPMP have been implemented in New England, New York, the mid-Atlantic states, the Midwest, the Southwest, and California. Strong opposition to the WPMP persists among some industry stakeholders, however, due largely to a perceived lack of adequate performance testing. This study reports on the model development and open-source implementation (in Java) of a computational wholesale power market organized in accordance with core WPMP features and operating over a realistically rendered transmission grid. The traders within this market model are strategic profit-seeking agents whose learning behaviors are based on data from human-subject experiments. Our key experimental focus is the complex interplay among structural conditions, market protocols, and learning behaviors in relation to short-term and longer-term market performance. Findings for a dynamic 5-node transmission grid test case are presented for concrete illustration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Washington, DC, 20219, USA

    Junjie Sun

  2. Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011-1070, USA

    Leigh Tesfatsion

Authors
  1. Junjie Sun
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  2. Leigh Tesfatsion
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Correspondence to Junjie Sun.

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This article is an abridged version of Sun and Tesfatsion ST07a

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Sun, J., Tesfatsion, L. Dynamic Testing of Wholesale Power Market Designs: An Open-Source Agent-Based Framework. Comput Econ 30, 291–327 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-007-9095-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-007-9095-1

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