May 22, 2025
Resource adequacy (RA) programs — from PJM’s Reliability Pricing Model to California’s Resource Adequacy Program — are facing pressure from multiple directions: load growth, changes in generation mix, emerging technologies, interdependencies with fuel supply operations and regulations, extreme weather, energy policy, and interconnection bottlenecks. In response to these stressors, many RA programs, already complex, are becoming even more complex, confusing, and harder to manage. At their worst, they end up encouraging rent-seeking behavior rather than reliability. Rather than continuing to reactively and continually tweak the current, complex models for RA, we argue that it would be helpful to take a step back and think about the design of RA programs from…
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