The Biden-Harris Administration, through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), today (Nov 20) announced up to a total of just under $10 million for six projects to improve 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. The six projects announced today will help facilitate the improvement or creation of more efficient and flexible wholesale markets, which will be essential to ensure grid resilience and reliability as new loads and generation come online.

"Efficient, fair, and transparent markets are essential to a reliable electric grid," said Maria Robinson, Director, Grid Deployment Office. "But U.S. wholesale markets were designed three decades ago when the power grid looked much different. With the widespread deployment of new energy resources and advanced grid and transmission technologies, creating effective wholesale electricity markets is critical." 

As more energy resources come online, creating flexible and efficient markets would not only ensure a reliable supply of electricity, but also help keep prices low for consumers. Utilities, state agencies, and market operators themselves have valuable perspectives on how to address this, but many currently lack the resources or training to meaningfully participate in market development. Administered by DOE's Grid Deployment Office, the WEMSE program provides technical and financial assistance to help ensure these stakeholders are able to provide critical insight into market design, expansion, and improvement activities, including interregional transmission infrastructure development. 

The six projects selected today 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 (SPP) region. Boise State University and SPP will develop and explore how to develop and apply a 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 (ISO)/Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) 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 Independent System Operator New England (ISO-NE) 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 (LDES) in the California Independent System Operation (CAISO) and the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) markets. The project will develop a new resource planning tool capable of allowing forward-scheduled economic bids from LDES and modeling the economic dispatch of the CAISO market across new multi-day market bidding times (up to 7 days out) that would allow LDES to schedule farther into the future than is currently possible (only day ahead in CAISO now).
   
• Temple University ($1.5 million) will study coordination between the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (PJM) and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) 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 who 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. Importantly, WEMSE funding supports studies, convenings, education, and analysis but does not support hard infrastructure development or tools.  

Learn more about the Grid Deployment Office.