Reading into energy market design

Conventional generation is dispatchable. You can ask a gas plant to run when demand is high and to stand down when it is not, and a market can be built around that promise. Wind and solar cannot make it. They produce when the weather allows, and the further generation shifts toward them, the less the old assumption holds.

That is a pricing problem before it is anything else. Day-ahead markets, balancing markets, and storage as a way of moving supply across time are the pieces I am working through at the moment. The aim for now is to know the institutional detail well enough to ask a sharper question than I can ask today.

There is a structural echo of the multitasking work in this, which is part of why it appeals to me: both are about allocating something scarce, attention or generation capacity, across competing demands under a hard constraint. The methods do not transfer. The instinct for where the interesting constraints sit does.