Jose Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio | Jul 19, 2010
Note: this invitation for a generative dialogue is first posted on the EWPC Blog and simultaneously in a few LinkedIn groups. Comments will be centralized in the EWPC Blog without identifying the name of the person, unless he or she authorizes it.
Two of the authors of the book Spot Pricing of Electricity, Richard D. Tabors, and Michael C. Caramanis, together with Geoffrey Parker, presented the very timely article Development of the Smart Grid: Missing Elements in the Policy Process at the Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences – 2010.
The abstract of the article says: “This paper seeks to frame one aspect of the Smart Grid discussion which has been under-recognized in regulatory and policy debates. Significant discussion has focused Smart Grid attention on the technologies and on technical interoperability, there has been, we argue, too little attention to questions of the structure or the operation of the market(s) in which the technologies will function. The authors contend that the market structure required for a successful Smart Grid is best understood considering a “platform” framework. We present our view of the interrelationship between that market platform, ultimate customers and power suppliers. It is our conclusion that without a thorough vetting of the market structure within which Smart Grid technologies will function, the full value of the innovations can not be realized.”
The authors are correct about the overwhelming attention on technology and interoperability and too little on market structure and market operability. Please correct us if we are wrong, that one of the few (maybe the only one) comprehensive exceptions has been the creation of the Electricity Without Price Controls Architecture Framework (EWPC-AF). The EWPC-AF emerged as a simple and holistic extension of the regulated spot price based energy marketplace that was unveiled in 1988 in the book Spot Pricing of Electricity, with Fred C. Schweppe as lead researcher and author and Michael C. Caramanis, Richard D. Tabors, and Roger Bohn as co-authors. Since Schweppe died before the book was published, the marketplace lost his leader.
For a fast introduction on markets and their operability, please read the December 2009 post The Electric Power Industry is Missing a Vibrant Retail Market. To learn more about complete and fully functional electric power markets, I suggest to start looking at the presentation A Generative Dialogue to Reach the End-State of the Electricity Industry, that I delivered at the Third Annual Carnegie Mellon Conference on the Electricity Industry, in March 2007.”
To continue learning, please turn to the EWPC Blog itself, which started on September 2007, on EnergyBlogs.com, and now has more than 200 entries. To browse that blog, I wrote the EWPC post Facilitating Research Navigation on EnergyBlogs.com .
yyy
Comments
Can we talk about something other than your EWPC blog and framework. This forum is meant to be non commercial and non promotional and some members have commented that we need to remind people of these rules. Thanks Jose.
I think Dr. Richard D. Tabors, Dr, Michael C. Caramanis, and DR. Geoffrey Parker have an important argument on Smart Grid when they write that "too little attention to questions of the structure or the operation of the market(s) in which the technologies will function."