Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions
March 2020

Evaluating Options for Enhancing Wholesale Competition and Implications for the Southeastern United States

Author
Type
Pages
Evaluating Options for Enhancing Wholesale Competition and Implications for the Southeastern United States Cover
Publisher

Given stated stakeholder clean energy and consumer goals, this paper offers a way to evaluate options for enhancing competition, compared to how utilities traditionally operate the electricity grid. The focus here is on wholesale transactions between generators and utilities serving end-use customers. These utilities then sell electricity at retail to their customers, and in many regions including the Southeast, they are state-regulated monopolies responsible for serving their customers at least cost. Their customers generally cannot choose a different utility or particular type of generation. For the purposes of this paper, this retail structure is assumed to remain unchanged.