Electricity Markets & the Power Grid: Load Curves, Merit-Order Dispatch, Reserve Margins & Wholesale Prices

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Read two daily load curves of a fictional power system, work out peak, average, daily energy and load factor, find the peak hour and build a load-duration curve with LARGE.
• Turn installed MW and capacity factors into annual MWh per technology, build the energy mix, total the available capacity and compare the renewable share of energy with the renewable share of capacity.
• Build the short-run marginal cost of seven plants from fuel price, efficiency, emission factor, carbon price and variable O&M, measure the spread of the merit order and find the carbon price at which gas becomes cheaper than coal.
• Rank nine offers by marginal cost, sort them into a merit order with SMALL and INDEX/MATCH, add the cumulative capacity and find the clearing price for the evening demand.
• Subtract wind and solar from demand to get the residual load, price every two-hour block from the merit-order staircase, and measure how much wind and solar lower the price.
• Derate the 2030 fleet to firm capacity, compare it with the forecast peak, size the new peakers needed for the target reserve margin and count the stress-day hours that would be tight if the largest unit failed.
• Calculate what a baseload plant earns above its costs, what price a solar park really captures compared with the baseload price, and how much a gas plant earns when it only runs in hours that pay.
• Finish Tomas's report: the system's emissions and its intensity per MWh, a price-duration curve, the share of hours in which gas sets a high price, and a pie chart of the generation mix.