Wholesale Electricity Markets in the United States: Identifying Future Challenges Facing Commercial Energy

In this article, we give our view of how the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) typically approaches market design issues in jurisdictional wholesale electricity markets in the United States and identify three challenges that lie ahead for these markets. The first challenge is declining prices in wholesale electric energy markets, which can lead to revenue adequacy issues for some resources. The second challenge is to ensure that wholesale electricity markets give investors the proper incentives to invest in resources that have the operational flexibility needed to serve more variable net loads in the future. The third challenge is the interdependence between the natural gas and electric industries, which has implications for reliability.