Wholesale electricity markets, which serve two-thirds of the United States, are at an evolutionary point as fading economics push coal and nuclear offline while state-level clean energy targets and fast-falling renewable energy prices push clean energy onto the grid.
But these seven U.S. wholesale electricity markets were designed around fossil fuels, and without reforms, they will become increasingly ill equipped to handle the influx of renewable energy and flexible distributed energy resources (like battery storage) coming online.
Grid managers and policymakers are considering how U.S. wholesale electricity markets should be restructured as they rapidly decarbonize, and shift to an energy system becoming dominated by carbon-free resources with near-zero power production costs.
