ACE Research Area:
Electric Power System Design

Last Updated: 16 March 2024

Site Developed By:
Leigh Tesfatsion
Professor Emerita of Economics
Courtesy Research Professor of
    Electrical & Computer Engineering
Heady Hall 260
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa 50011-1054
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7783-2708
https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi
tesfatsi AT iastate.edu

General Resources on Electric Power Systems
Electricity Markets: Course (undergrad/M.S.)
Electricity Markets: Open-Source Software
ACE Homepage
Electric Power System Schematic

Site Disclaimer:
Unfortunately, links to many excellent on-line electric power resources originally posted here are now broken and had to be removed. Below are annotated pointers to remaining still-available online resources (plus journal-published materials) that visitors might find useful for their work or of historical interest.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Starting in the mid-nineteen nineties, the U.S. electric power industry has undergone substantial changes in both its structure (ownership and technology aspects) and its architecture (operational and oversight aspects).

During the early years of this restructuring, these changes largely consisted of efforts to move the industry away from highly regulated markets with administered cost-based pricing and towards competitive markets in which prices more fully reflected supply and demand forces. The goal of these changes was to provide industry participants with better incentives to control costs and introduce innovations.

These early restructuring efforts were controversial and difficult. The meltdown in the restructured California wholesale power market in the summer of 2000 -- due in part to market manipulation by Enron traders -- demonstrated what could happen when newly proposed market designs were implemented without sufficient pre-testing. Following this California crisis, many electric power system researchers stressed the need to combine sound understanding of physical electric power system operations with careful economic analyses of incentives in order to develop electric power system designs with good real-world performance characteristics.

The primary goal of this resource site is to encourage the development and study of electric power system designs from a perspective that adequately addresses both economic and engineering concerns.

In accordance with this goal, stress is placed on research making use of powerful agent-based computational platforms. These platforms, particularly in co-simulated form, permit electric power systems to be studied as evolving networks of system operators, producers, traders, and customers learning to operate through time over realistically rendered transmission and distribution grids.

Basic Issues

Surveys and Overviews

Other Readings

Software, Toolkits, and Demos

Related Resource Sites and Groups

Some Early Individual Researchers

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