Overview

U.S. wholesale electricity markets are complex, technically demanding systems. Professionals whose work interacts with these markets need to understand their design, drivers, and idiosyncrasies.

This two-day bootcamp provides a structured introduction to U.S. electricity markets, covering independent system operators and regional transmission organizations (ISO/RTOs) and non-RTO regions. Participants are guided through the economic logic, institutional structures, and operational challenges that shape price formation, investment incentives, and system reliability in the electricity sector.

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be able to:

·        Identify the economic and technical characteristics that make electricity markets distinct from other commodity markets

·        Recognize price formation and investment drivers in vertically integrated utility systems

·        Explain the merit-order curve and the role of marginal generation in ISO price discovery

·        Understand the intuition and calculation underlying locational marginal pricing (LMP)

·        Describe the characteristics and cost structures of major generation types on the U.S. grid

·        Compare day-ahead, real-time, reliability, and ancillary services dispatch

·        Understand the purpose of capacity markets and the differing capacity approaches across regions

·        Compare hedging instruments, including virtual bids, financial transmission rights, and commodity futures

·        Identify sources of market failure or structural weakness

·        Discuss emerging resources and their impacts on market outcomes

·        Evaluate demand-side stressors on electricity systems

·        Identify key data sources and research resources for market analysis

Who should attend

This course is designed for early-career professionals starting work in U.S. power companies, ISO/RTO markets, trading desks, regulatory bodies or organizations doing electricity-market-focused research. It is also appropriate for experienced professionals whose work interfaces with electricity markets, but who do not work directly in market operations. This course emphasizes market economics and institutional design, rather than engineering or environmental policy.

Agenda

Day 1

9:45 – 10:00 AM      Log in and welcome

10:00 – 11:30 AM    

Basic market structure and core economics

We begin by contrasting electricity with a standard commodity like wheat to show why familiar market intuition breaks down. Electricity is simultaneously a commodity, a network good, and a real-time service, which creates constant tension between economic efficiency and physical feasibility. Prices play a coordination role, but they often behave in unintuitive ways because the system they’re coordinating is constrained.

This section introduces the basic supply-and-demand framework we’ll return to throughout the course, then immediately shows where it strains under electricity’s physical realities. We examine generation and load, the requirement that supply and demand balance at all times, and the consequences of largely inelastic short-run demand. We then layer in marginal versus fixed costs to explain why electricity markets cannot rely on textbook competitive outcomes.

Before markets, electricity systems solved these challenges through regulated monopoly structures. We walk through the economic logic of natural monopoly, vertically integrated utilities, and cost-of-service regulation, and why this model made sense for much of the 20th century. We then examine its shortcomings, including weak incentives for efficiency and investment discipline.

11:45 – 1:00 PM    

    Restructuring and the rise of ISO/RTOs

This section covers the shift toward competitive wholesale markets in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We explain why regional transmission organizations and independent system operators emerged, what problems they were meant to solve, and why U.S. market structures remain heterogeneous and incomplete. We also distinguish wholesale from retail markets and clarify the continuing role of regulators.

We move inside the ISO framework to understand who owns assets, who participates in markets, and how governance works. We introduce merit-order dispatch and uniform pricing, showing why paying all generators the market price creates incentives for honest bidding. We then explain why this idealized system breaks down in practice due to imperfect competition, transmission constraints, and reliability requirements.

1:00 – 2:00 PM        Lunch break

2:00 – 3:15 PM        

Locational marginal pricing: intuition and mechanics

This is the most technically demanding segment of the course. We build intuition for locational marginal pricing by showing how constraints create local scarcity and require prices to vary across the network. We then walk through a simplified optimization problem and a three-bus example to show how system energy, congestion, and loss prices emerge from the LMP math. This is the hardest thing we’ll do; once you’ve got this, the rest is much easier.

3:30 – 5:00 PM      

   Generation technologies and economic characteristics

We close the day by grounding abstract market concepts in physical assets. This section surveys major generation types on the U.S. grid—coal, hydro, gas, nuclear, wind, solar, pumped storage, batteries, and demand response—focusing on cost structure, flexibility, and market roles rather than engineering detail. We explicitly tie each resource back to marginal cost, fixed cost recovery, constraints, and the merit-order framework.

Day 2

10:00 – 11:30 AM 

     Reality intrudes: missing money, reliability, congestion

We begin Day 2 by distinguishing day-ahead and real-time markets and explaining why both exist. We discuss price convergence, forecast error, and the role of virtual transactions. We explain capacity markets and other mechanisms designed to address fixed-cost recovery and resource adequacy across different regions.

We introduce ancillary services and financial transmission rights as tools for managing reliability and congestion in constrained systems. We explain how these products are co-optimized with energy markets and why they exist only because locational pricing exists. The focus is on economic purpose rather than market minutiae.

11:45 – 1:00 PM    

    Hedging, risk, and bad behavior

Here we step back and look at electricity markets from a risk-management perspective. We compare hedging and speculation; examine futures, virtual bids, and financial transmission rights as hedging instruments; and discuss basis risk. We then look at famous cases of market manipulation and gaming to illustrate how incentives can be exploited, and how market rules evolve in response.

1:00 – 2:00 PM     Lunch break

2:00 – 3:45 PM     

    Technological and demand-side disruptions

This section explores how new technologies and changing demand patterns are reshaping electricity markets. We examine batteries, demand response, and behind-the-meter resources, as well as electrification, EV charging, crypto mining, and data centers. The emphasis is on how these shifts stress existing market designs rather than on forecasting outcomes.

4:00 – 5:00 PM     

    Data and analytical resources

We close by orienting participants to the data ecosystem surrounding U.S. electricity markets. This includes ISO/RTO data portals, federal datasets, and third-party tools commonly used in analysis. The goal is to leave participants knowing where to look, and confident they can now make sense of what they find.

Course Completion

Course format                     Live, instructor-led online training

Total instructional hours    12 hours over two days

Instructional methods         Lecture, conceptual examples, discussion, polling questions

Assessment                          Short quiz at the conclusion of the course

Certificate                            Suitable for internal training and professional development documentation. To receive a certificate, participants must attend the live sessions and complete the end-of-course quiz.

Price and Payment

Course prices                      $749 (for-profit institutions)

   $499 (government or non-profit institutions)

Register at https://forms.gle/zxjAWXkFzNdvixA87 

Registration is confirmed once payment is received. Invoices will be sent by email, and payment is due no later than one week before the course start date. Unpaid registrations may be released.  

Further information

Course is limited to 15 participants to allow discussion and will not be recorded. If you are unable to attend, registrations may be transferred with advance notice.    

For questions about the course or registration, contact teaching@stradlingeconomics.com