In 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded a grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to the Western Governors' Association to enhance member states' capacity to participate in interconnection-wide transmission planning. Such planning in the West is done by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC), who also received a companion DOE grant to help with its own planning efforts. Associated with the Western Governors' Association is the Western Interstate Energy Board, which received Western Governors' Association grant funding for its State Provincial Steering Committee (SPSC)/Committee on Regional Electric Power Coordination (CREPC) to conduct studies and work relevant to the interests of its state electricity official members. At its October 2013 meeting, the SPSC/CREPC asked DOE's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability to help document and present curtailment practices for bulk power wind and solar generation. NREL was asked by DOE to provide the assistance.

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Demand for affordable, reliable, domestically sourced, and low-carbon electricity is on the rise. This growing demand is driven in part by evolving public policy priorities, especially reducing the health and environmental impacts of electricity service and expanding energy access to underserved customers. Consequently, variable renewable energy resources comprise an increasing share of electricity generation globally. At the same time, new opportunities for addressing the variability of renewables are being strengthened through advances in smart grids, communications, and technologies that enable dispatchable demand response and distributed generation to extend to the mass market. A key challenge of merging these opportunities is market design-determining how to create incentives and compensate providers justly for attributes and performance that ensure a reliable and secure gridin a context that fully realizes the potential of a broad array of sources of flexibility in both the wholesale power and retail markets.This report reviews the suite of wholesale power market designs in use and under consideration to ensure adequacy, security, and flexibility in a landscape of significant variable renewable energy. It also examines considerations needed to ensure that wholesale market designs are inclusive of emerging technologies, such as demand response, distributed generation, and distributed storage. The report concludes with a review of potential areas for future research on wholesale power markets.