IEEE Seminar Announcement

Abstract: "Power markets" used to be an oxymoron. Now power engineers must respond to the challenge of designing markets that will reliably provide what consumers want at minimum economic and environmental cost. To do so means that power engineers must master new skills: economics, marketing, game theory, and finance. In light of difficulties in California and elsewhere, this talk will look at some of the challenges and questions facing market designers and policy makers. I will then summarize some research results relevant to specific issues, including the following questions. Do we need a market for generation capacity that is separate from a market for energy? How can we assess the extent to which a market can be "gamed" and distorted by market power? These issues are addressed by a range of production costing and capacity expansion methods, some of which consider the impact of transmission constraints.

Speaker Bio: Benjamin F. Hobbs (S.M., IEEE) has been Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD since 1995. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. From 1977-79, he was Economics Associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory, National Center for Analysis of Energy Systems. He later joined the Energy Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1982-1984. Between 1984 and 1995, he was on the faculty of the departments of Systems Engineering and Civil Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. He serves on the California ISO Market Surveillance Committee, the Public Interest Advisory Committee of the Gas Technology Institute, and as an Advisor to the Netherlands Energy Research Center.

Dr. Hobbs earned a PhD in environmental systems engineering from Cornell University in 1983, where his dissertation concerned deregulated power markets. Prof. Hobbs has published widely on electric utility regulation, economics and systems analysis and on environmental and water resources systems. Dr. Hobbs was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation in 1986. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.