#1 Fix the energy market
Re-architect how energy is priced, procured, and coordinated across the grid.
Electricity is becoming the foundation of the modern economy. It powers homes, hospitals, communications, manufacturing and public services. It will increasingly power transport, heating, industrial production, data centres and artificial intelligence. Almost every credible pathway to net zero therefore depends upon…
The challenge
Any credible market architecture has to coordinate all of the following at once — not just one of them.
- Market timing — When and how often prices are set
- Architecture and control — Who coordinates the system, and how
- Prices and products — What is priced, and how granularly
- Participation — Who can take part, and at what scale
- Network and physics — How physical network constraints are represented
- Reliability and scarcity — How scarcity risk and reliability are handled
- Fairness — How equal treatment is defined and enforced
- Investment — How long-term investment and fixed costs are recovered
What must a good solution do?
What “good” looks like A successful electricity system cannot be judged only by whether it produces enough energy at the lowest theoretical cost. The modern grid is a cyber physical, socio technical and economic system . It combines: physical infrastructure and electrical flows; software, communications and automated…
- Physical & engineering feasibility
- Cyber-physical & operational performance
- Human participation & behavioural realism
- Fairness & distributional outcomes
- Economic & market design
- Governance & legitimacy
- Resilience & security
Candidate architectures
Compare all candidates →- Great Britain — Reformed National MarketA national wholesale market supported by balancing, constraint management, capacity procurement, Contracts…
- Zonal Marginal PricingA wholesale architecture in which electricity is priced within geographic bidding zones, inter zonal…
- PJM-style Locational Marginal PricingA centrally optimised nodal market in which wholesale prices reflect marginal energy cost, transmission…
- Australian NEM + Dynamic Network AccessAn emerging architecture combining five minute regional wholesale dispatch and pricing with separate…
- Fair Play Automatic Market Maker (FP-AMM)A continuously clearing market architecture for coordinating distributed energy resources across the…
Investigation status
- Problem defined
- Complete
- Outcomes defined
- Complete
- Design space
- 18 decisions
- Candidates
- 5 under review
- Mapped positions
- 90
- Evidence claims
- 5
- Open critiques
- 4
- Decision
- Not yet reached
How this investigation works
Compare
- Candidate solutions
- Design positions
Each candidate takes a position on every design decision — that's what the comparison matrix shows.
Test
- Evidence
- Critique
Evidence and critique live on each candidate's own pages, not as a separate tab here.
Decide