An analysis of electricity price behavior when the market in California was dysfunctional

The electricity market in California worked well for the first two years after restructuring, but in the summer of 2000 there were frequent high price spikes and then persistently high prices during the winter and the spring of 2001. This research develops econometric models to explain the behavior of the spot and forward prices for electricity and the relationship between them when the market in California was dysfunctional.;The first results demonstrate that the high spot prices in the day-ahead market during the summer of 2000 were caused by changes in the bid behavior of buyers as well as by the offer behavior of sellers. After the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) declared that these high spot prices were "unjust and unreasonable", the FERC approved the payment of refunds to customers in California but not in other areas within the Western Inter-Connection (WECC). However, the results of a Vector Auto-Regressive model (VAR) show that the high spot prices in California were transferred immediately to other states in the WECC and the spot prices at different trading hubs belong to a single market.;After the intervention by FERC in December 2000, spot prices and forward prices of electricity were unusually high. Estimated distributed lag models, using both monthly and daily data, show that there were strong positive relationships between the price shocks for electricity and natural gas in the spot markets and the forward prices for electricity. Risk premiums in the forward prices for electricity were estimated and the results show that the price shocks for electricity after FERC's intervention were the primary cause of the high forward prices.;The main conclusions for regulatory policy are (1) it is virtually impossible to contain the effects of a dysfunctional electricity market to a single region because other regions are linked through the electrical grid, and (2) it is essential to intervene immediately and effectively when the spot prices have been ruled by regulators to be unjust and unreasonable. The intervention by the FERC did not prevent persistently high spot and forward prices for customers throughout the WECC.