University of California Energy Institute

PWP-036

Market Power in California Electricity Markets

Severin Borenstein, James Bushnell, Edward Kahn, and Steven Stoft (UCEI)

As the electricity industry in California undergoes a process of fundamental restructuring, important new products and markets will be created while others will lose significance. In PWP-036, Borenstein, Bushnell, Kahn, and Stoft make an initial survey of the products and markets that will be prominent in the emerging new electricity industry. They describe approaches to analyzing the prospects for, and the impacts of, market power abuse in these various product markets. The key product markets that are discussed include the market for spot electrical energy, markets for pool-based and physical power contracts, and markets for grid services such as load balancing and spinning reserve. The authors caution that structural measures of market power, such as the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI), have certain general shortcomings that are exacerbated when applied to restructured electricity markets. Fortunately, the direct estimation of competitive equilibria, such as a Cournot oligopoly equilibrium, appears to be more feasible for this industry than is generally the case.