The Electricity Strategy Game replicates the world of strategic trading in wholesale electricity markets. Players utilize generation portfolios to compete in a sequence of daily electricity spot markets. Spot market conditions vary from hour to hour and day to day. Each team of students controls one firm in the game, which owns 4-7 generating units. Teams must develop strategies to deploy their assets over this sequence of spot markets while accounting for the cost structure of their portfolio, varying levels of hourly demand, and the strategies of other players.
The basic game has seven firms bidding into a daily wholesale electricity spot market with four hours in each day. The game can also be used to simulate the effect of long-term contracts, uniform-price versus pay-as-bid auctions, various forms of bid regulation and price caps, transmission constraints, and pricing greenhouse gases with either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program.
The ESG software is written in Stata. The software is available only to instructors at non-profit colleges and universities. Contact Severin Borenstein (borenste@haas.berkeley.edu) .