Electric Energy Economics (E3) Group

Last Updated: 8 January 2024

IMPORTANT NOTE: The E3 Group transitioned into the Integrated Retail and Wholesale (IRW) Power System Operations Group in 2011, and subsequently into the Integrated Transmission and Distribution (ITD) Project in 2015. Consequently, the E3 Group site is no longer maintained.

Leigh Tesfatsion
Professor Emerita of Economics
Courtesy Professor of
  and Electrical & Computer Engineering
Department of Economics
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-1070
https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi
tesfatsi AT iastate.edu

Table of Contents:

Regular Weekly Meeting Time/Place for E3 Group:

Spring 2011 Meetings:   Fridays, 3:30-5:00pm, 568B Heady Hall (fifth floor)

General E3 Group Information

E3 Mailing List (includes core participants listed below):

E3Group AT iastate.edu

Core E3 Group Participants:

Other Current and Past Participants:

Project Support

EPRC Project 4 (Integrated Retail/Wholesale Power Systems):
Sponsor: Electric Power Research Center (EPRC)
Title: "Integrated Retail and Wholesale Power System Operation with Smart-Grid Functionality"
Principle Investigators: Dionysios Aliprantis and Leigh Tesfatsion
Date of Award: Funding Start Date - August 2010
Duration of Award: Three years

PNNL Project (Integrated Retail/Wholesale Power Markets):
Sponsor: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Battelle
Title: "A Test Bed for the Integrated Experimental Study of Retail and Wholesale Power Market Designs"
Principal Investigator: Leigh Tesfatsion
Date of Award: Funding Start Date - June 2009
Duration of Award: Three years (conditional on successful end-of-year reviews)

EPRC Project 3 (ISO/GenCo Risk Management):
Sponsor: Electric Power Research Center (EPRC)
Title: "Financial and Operational Risk Management for Restructured Wholesale Power Markets"
Principle Investigator: Leigh Tesfatsion
Date of Award: Funding Start Date - August 2009
Duration of Award: Three years

EPRC Project 2 (ISO/GenCo Forecasting):
Sponsor: Electric Power Research Center (EPRC)
Title: "Forecasting Grid Congestion and Prices for Transmission Grid Operation and Investment"
Principle Investigators: Chen-Ching Liu and Leigh Tesfatsion
Date of Award: Funding Start Date - August 2007
Duration of Award: Three years
Project Homepage: http://econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/EPRCForecastGroup.htm

EPRC Project 1 (MISO Market Performance):
Sponsor: Electric Power Research Center (EPRC)
Title: "Testing the Efficiency and Reliability Impacts of MISO's Midwest Market Initiative"
Principle Investigators: Leigh Tesfatsion (Lead PI) and Herman C. Quirmbach
Date of Award: Funding Start Date - August 2006
Duration of Award: Three years
Project Homepage: http://econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/MISOEnergyGroup.htm

NSF Project (U.S. Bulk Energy Transportation Networks):
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Title: "Decision Models for Bulk Energy Transportation Networks"
Program: Human and Social Dynamics Competition (Decision Making, Risk, and Uncertainty)
Principal Investigators:
Jim McCalley (Lead PI), Sarah Ryan, Stephen Sapp, & Leigh Tesfatsion
Date of Award: September 2005
Duration of Award: Three years (with Continuation)
Project Homepage: http://econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/NSFEnergy2005.htm

Project-Related Publications and Working Papers

Hongyan Li and Leigh Tesfatsion, "ISO Net Surplus Collection and Allocation in Wholesale Power Markets Under Locational Marginal Pricing" [(WP Preprint,pdf,822K), (PPT slides,1.6M)], IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 26, Issue 2, 2011, 627-641. (DOI Location).

Qun Zhou, Leigh Tesfatsion, and Chen-Ching Liu, "Short-Term Congestion Forecasting in Wholesale Power Markets" (WP pdf, 295K), IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 2011, to appear.

Hongyan Li and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Co-Learning Patterns as Weakly Emergent Phenomena in Wholesale Electric Power Markets" (pdf,1.4M), Working Paper No. 10042, Economics Department, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, December 2010.

Nanpeng Yu, Leigh Tesfatsion, and Chen-Ching Liu, "Financial Bilateral Contract Negotiation in Wholesale Power Markets using Nash Bargaining Theory" (pdf,788K), Working Paper No. 10032, Economics Department, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, July 2010.

Nanpeng Yu, Abhishek Somani, and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Financial Risk Management in Restructured Wholesale Power Markets: Concepts and Tools" (pdf,477K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, July 2010.

Qun Zhou, Leigh Tesfatsion, and Chen-Ching Liu, "Global Sensitivity Analysis for the Short-Term Prediction of System Variables" (pdf,297K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, July 2010.

Dionysios Aliprantis, Scott Penick, Leigh Tesfatsion, and Huan Zhao, "Integrated Retail and Wholesale Power System Operation with Smart-Grid Funcionality" (pdf,518K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, July 2010.

Hongyan Li, Junjie Sun, and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Testing Institutional Arrangements via Agent-Based Modeling: A U.S. Electricity Market Application" (pdf,1.8M), ISU Economics Working Paper No. 10001. Latest Revision: 11 January 2010. To appear in H. Dawid and W. Semmler (Eds.), Computational Methods in Economic Dynamics, Springer, 2010.

Nanpeng Yu, Chen-Ching Liu, and James Price, “Evaluation of Market Rules Using a Multi-Agent Platform,”, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 25, 2010, 470-479.

Hongyan Li and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Development of Open Source Software for Power Market Research: The AMES Test Bed" (pdf preprint,601K), Journal of Energy Markets, Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer 2009, 111-128.

Leigh Tesfatsion, "Auction Basics for Wholesale Power Markets: Objectives and Pricing Rules" (pdf,504K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Calgary, Alberta, CA, July 26-30, 2009.

Hongyan Li and Leigh Tesfatsion, "The AMES Wholesale Power Market Test Bed: A Computational Laboratory for Research, Teaching, and Training" (pdf,930K), Proceedings of the Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Calgary, Alberta, CA, July 26-30, 2009.

Hongyan Li, Junjie Sun, and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Separation and Volatility of Locational Marginal Prices in Restructured Wholesale Power Markets" (pdf,2.3M), ISU Economics Working Paper #09009, June 2009.

Haifeng Liu, Leigh Tesfatsion, and A. A. Chowdhury, "Derivation of Locational Marginal Prices for Restructured Wholesale Power Markets", Journal of Energy Markets, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2009, 3-27.
Note: An abridged version of this paper was presented at the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Calgary, CA, July 26-30, 2009.

Qun Zhou, Leigh Tesfatsion, and Chen-Ching Liu, "Scenario Generation for Price Forecasting in Restructured Wholesale Power Markets" (pdf,176K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power Systems & Exposition Conference, Seattle, WA, March 15-18, 2009.

Hongyan Li and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Capacity Withholding in Restructured Wholesale Power Markets: An Agent-Based Test Bed Study" (pdf,2.3M), Proceedings of th IEEE Power Systems & Exposition Conference, Seattle, WA, March 15-18, 2009.

Abhishek Somani and Leigh Tesfatsion, "An Agent-Based Test Bed Study of Wholesale Power Market Performance Measures" (pdf,2.8M), IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 4, November 2008, 56-72.

Hongyan Li, Junjie Sun, and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Dynamic LMP Response Under Alternative Price-Cap and Price-Sensitive Demand Scenarios" (pdf,465K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, July 20-24, 2008.

Nanpeng Yu, Chen-Ching Liu, and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Modeling of Suppliers’ Learning Behaviors in an Electricity Market Environment" (pdf,277K), International Journal of Engineering Intelligent Systems, vol. 15, no. 2, 2007, 115-121.

Junjie Sun and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Dynamic Testing of Wholesale Power Market Designs: An Open-Source Agent-Based Framework", Computational Economics, Volume 30, Number 3, 2007, pp. 291-327. This article is an abridged version of ISU Economics Working Paper No. 06025 (pdf,2.2MB).

Junjie Sun and Leigh Tesfatsion, "An Agent-Based Computational Laboratory for Wholesale Power Market Design" (pdf,724K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Tampa, Florida, June 2007.

Junjie Sun and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Open-Source Software for Power Industry Research, Teaching, and Training: A DC-OPF Illustration" (pdf,115K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Tampa, Florida, June 2007.

Junjie Sun and Leigh Tesfatsion, "DC Optimal Power Flow Formulation and Testing Using QuadProgJ" (pdf,526K), ISU Economics Working Paper No. 06014, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Revised July 2007.

Junjie Sun and Wenzhuo Shang, "Evaluating the Performance of Financial Transmission Rights Auctions: Evidence from the U.S. Midwest Energy Region" (pdf), Dissertation Chapter, November 2006.

Steven Widergren, Junjie Sun, and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Market Design Test Environments" (pdf preprint,136K), Proceedings of the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, Montreal, June 2006.

Open Source Software Releases

AMES Wholesale Power Market Test Bed (Java): A Free Open Source Computational Laboratory for the Agent-Based Modeling of Electricity Systems

The AMES Wholesale Power Market Test Bed, developed entirely in Java by Hongyan Li, Junjie Sun, and Leigh Tesfatsion, is an extensible and modular agent-based computational laboratory for studying the dynamic efficiency and reliability of wholesale power markets restructured in accordance with guidelines issued by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. AMES models strategically-learning traders interacting over time in an ISO-managed wholesale power market operating over a transmission grid subject to congestion effects. Congestion on the grid is managed by means of locational marginal prices derived from optimal power flow solutions.

AMES is a free open source tool suitable for research, teaching, and training applications. It is designed for the intensive experimental study of small to medium-sized systems. A graphical user interface permits the creation, modification, analysis and storage of scenarios, parameter initialization and editing, specification of behavioral rules (e.g. learning methods) for market participants, and output reports through table and chart displays. AMES is an acronym for Agent-based Modeling of Electricity Systems.

DCOPFJ (Java): A Free Open Source Solver for DC Optimal Power Flow Problems

The DCOPFJ Package, developed entirely in Java by Junjie Sun and Leigh Tesfatsion, is a free open source stand-alone solver for small to medium-sized DC optimal power flow problems having a strictly convex quadratic programming (SCQP) formulation.

The DCOPFJ package incorporates an SCQP solver (QuadProgJ) wrapped in an outer SI-to-PU data processing shell. QuadProgJ implements the well-known dual active-set SCQP algorithm developed by Goldfarb and Idnani (1983). QuadProgJ has been shown to match or exceed the accuracy of the proprietary C-language QP solver BPMPD (highly recommended by MATPOWER) when tested on a public repository of small to medium-sized SCQP problems.

The DCOPFJ package has been successfully run on DC-OPF test cases commonly used for training purposes.

Project-Related Presentations to External Groups (Ordered by Date of Presentation)

Background Readings

Online Resource Materials

Miscellaneous