Sustainable Power Systems

Course Description

Sustainable Power Systems covers the key technical and economic characteristics of power systems and their interaction in the design and operation of markets that foster environmental, economic, and security stability in today's complex power systems.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, EEL is the Electrical Engineering prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Science and Engineering. It is offered at approximately 2 Florida institutions.

⚠ Read the description carefully: the subject is markets. Of UWF's three EEL3111-prerequisite energy electives, this is the one whose centre of gravity is economic rather than technical — the phrase "their interaction in the design and operation of markets" is the operative one. Students expecting a technology survey should look at EEL4283, and those wanting integration engineering at EEL4287.

The insight the course is built on is that electricity markets are constrained by physics in a way most markets are not. Power cannot be stored cheaply at scale, it flows according to Kirchhoff's laws rather than contractual paths, and supply must match demand instant by instant. Every distinctive feature of electricity market design — locational pricing, capacity markets, ancillary service products — exists because a market for a normal commodity does not work when those constraints apply. A student who understands why is well ahead of one who has memorised the market structures.

⚠⚠ Florida is a useful and unusual case here, because it is not a restructured market. Most of the market literature describes ISO and RTO regions; Florida is served by vertically integrated regulated utilities under Public Service Commission oversight, so the mechanisms the course teaches operate differently in the student's own state. That contrast is worth drawing out rather than glossing.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is therefore derived. The figure here applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for a 3-semester-hour course. Confirm the meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the physical characteristics of power systems that constrain market design.
• Explain why electricity is not a conventional commodity.
• Describe generation cost structures and the merit order.
• Describe marginal cost pricing and its application to electricity.
• Describe vertically integrated and restructured industry models and compare them.
• Describe wholesale market structures: day-ahead, real-time, and bilateral.
• Explain locational marginal pricing and its components.
• Describe transmission congestion and its economic consequences.
• Describe capacity markets and the resource adequacy problem.
• Describe ancillary service markets and the products traded.
• Describe the economics of renewable integration.
• Explain the merit-order effect of zero-marginal-cost generation.
• Describe carbon pricing mechanisms and renewable portfolio standards.
• Describe rate regulation and the regulated utility revenue requirement.
• Describe retail rate design and its incentive effects.
• Describe reliability and security as economic as well as technical objectives.
• Analyse the economic effects of a policy or market design change.
• Evaluate trade-offs among environmental, economic, and security objectives.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe market power and its mitigation in electricity markets.
• Describe demand response participation in markets.
• Describe storage participation and its market treatment.
• Describe distribution-level market concepts.
• Analyse a real market outcome or price event.
• Describe international electricity market designs.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Physical constraints on electricity markets
• Generation cost structures and merit order
• Marginal cost pricing
• Vertically integrated versus restructured models
• Wholesale market structures
• Locational marginal pricing
• Transmission congestion and its cost
• Capacity markets and resource adequacy
• Ancillary services
• Economics of renewable integration
• The merit-order effect
• Carbon pricing and portfolio standards
• Rate regulation and revenue requirement
• Retail rate design
• Reliability and security economics
• Environmental, economic, and security trade-offs

Optional Topics

• Market power and mitigation
• Demand response in markets
• Storage market participation
• Distribution-level markets
• Market event case studies
• International market designs

Resources & Tools

• Kirschen and Strbac, Fundamentals of Power System Economics — the standard text, written for engineers rather than economists.
• Stoft, Power System Economics — the other classic, and unusually clear on why electricity markets are peculiar.
• ISO and RTO market documentation — PJM, MISO, ERCOT and CAISO all publish their market manuals free; heavy but authoritative.
• ISO/RTO real-time price maps — free; watching locational prices diverge across a map during congestion makes the concept concrete in a way no derivation does.
• Florida Public Service Commission (psc.state.fl.us) — free; rate cases, ten-year site plans, and the actual regulatory record for the student's own state.
• FERC (ferc.gov) — free; orders and filings governing wholesale markets.
• EIA (eia.gov) — free; generation, price, and fuel data including Florida-specific series.
• Lazard LCOE analysis — free annually; widely cited cost comparison.
• MATPOWER — free; its optimal power flow computes locational marginal prices directly, which makes the theory tangible.
• IEEE Power and Energy Society — inexpensive student membership.

Career Pathways

• Electrical engineers — SOC 17-2071.
• Energy market analysis and trading — quantitative roles that value engineers who understand the physics as well as the price, and they compensate well.
• Utility resource planning and regulatory affairs — Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy Florida, TECO, JEA, OUC, Gulf Power; ten-year site plans and rate cases are engineering-economic work.
• Regulatory analysis — the Florida Public Service Commission and the Office of Public Counsel employ analysts directly.
• Energy consulting — integration studies, market studies, and expert testimony.
• Independent power producers and developers — NextEra Energy Resources is headquartered in Florida, and project economics is its core discipline.
• Energy policy roles — state government, advocacy organisations, and research institutions.
• Corporate energy procurement — large commercial and industrial buyers hire for this, and power purchase agreements are negotiated by people who understand both sides.
• ⚠ This course pairs unusually well with a business or economics minor, and the combination is rarer than it should be.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Three UWF energy electives share one prerequisite and overlap substantially

• EEL4283 (Introduction to Renewable Energy), EEL4287 (Future Energy Systems) and EEL4290 (Sustainable Power Systems) all take EEL3111 as their only prerequisite, and their published descriptions overlap on renewable sources, storage, and grid integration.
• The distinct centre of gravity of each, read from the catalog text: EEL4283 is the survey — source types, storage, distribution, policy, and computer-aided resource assessment; EEL4287 is the integration and technology course — grid, microgrid, smart grid, electric vehicles, storage, efficient buildings, cybersecurity; EEL4290 is the economics and markets course — technical and economic characteristics and their interaction in market design.
• ⚠ Because they share a prerequisite rather than forming a sequence, they can be taken in any order — but taking all three will involve real repetition, and the marginal value of the third is lower than the first.
• ⚠⚠ Taking EEL3211 and EEL4213 instead is the deeper route into power engineering. These three are accessible after Circuits I and are genuinely useful; they do not substitute for the analytical power sequence, and a student aiming at utility engineering should not mistake them for it.
• Ask the department which of the three runs in which term before planning around them.

⚠⚠ The asterisk in a UWF prerequisite means the course may be taken at the same time

• UWF's catalog marks a concurrent course with an asterisk, defined on the catalog's Course Information page as: "This course may be taken prior to or during the same term."
• ⚠ This is the single most useful piece of notation in the UWF engineering catalog, and it is easy to miss. A prerequisite written without an asterisk must be completed first; one written with an asterisk may be taken in the same term.
• The practical effect is on time to degree. Reading an asterisked prerequisite as a hard prerequisite adds a term to the sequence for no reason, and in a tightly chained major like electrical engineering that error compounds down the whole plan.
• Confirm with an advisor before relying on it, and note that the registration system, not the catalog text, is what actually enforces the rule.

⚠ The prerequisite is only EEL3111

• UWF requires only EEL3111 Circuits I, not asterisked, so it must be completed first.
• ⚠⚠ No economics prerequisite is published, and the course is substantially economic. Students without any microeconomics background should expect to pick up marginal cost, supply curves, and market clearing as they go — the concepts are not difficult, and encountering them for the first time inside a technical elective is a real adjustment.
• A prior course in engineering economics or microeconomics makes this noticeably easier.

⚠⚠ Why electricity markets look strange, and why the strangeness is necessary

• Electricity cannot be stored cheaply at scale, so supply must match demand continuously. Markets for storable commodities smooth shocks through inventory; electricity markets have no inventory to smooth with.
• ⚠ Power flows by physics, not by contract. A trade between two parties changes flows across the whole network, and this is why transmission rights and locational pricing exist — a contract path is a fiction that the laws of physics do not respect.
• ⚠⚠ Demand is extremely inelastic in the short run. Most consumers see an averaged retail rate and cannot respond to wholesale prices at all, which is why prices can spike by orders of magnitude when supply is tight — there is almost nothing on the demand side to stop them.
• Zero-marginal-cost generation suppresses wholesale prices when it runs. The merit-order effect is good for consumers in the short run and undermines the revenue of the generators the system still needs for reliability, which is the missing-money problem capacity markets were designed to address.
• Reliability is a public good and markets do not supply it automatically, which is the economic argument for regulatory intervention. The course should present that as a trade-off with real costs, not as a settled question.

⚠⚠ Florida is regulated, not restructured — and most of the literature assumes otherwise

• Florida did not restructure its electricity industry. Investor-owned utilities remain vertically integrated — generating, transmitting, and distributing — under Florida Public Service Commission rate regulation.
• ⚠ There is no ISO or RTO covering peninsular Florida, so the day-ahead and real-time markets that dominate the textbooks do not operate here in the same form.
• ⚠⚠ Most course material will describe markets the student cannot observe locally. That is worth knowing rather than being confused by, and the comparison is analytically valuable: Florida is a live example of the counterfactual the restructuring debate is about.
• Cost recovery in Florida runs through rate cases and cost-recovery clauses, including a storm-restoration mechanism that is distinctively important here.
• Florida's ten-year site plans are public, and reading one is the most direct look available at how a regulated utility actually plans generation.

Florida grid context worth carrying into this course

• Florida is close to an electrical peninsula. Its ties to the rest of the Eastern Interconnection run through a limited northern corridor, which constrains how much power can be imported during a shortfall and makes in-state generation and reserve margin unusually important.
• Summer and winter peaks are both air-conditioning and heating driven, and Florida's load shape is dominated by weather to a degree few states match.
• ⚠⚠ Hurricanes are a design condition here, not a contingency. Storm hardening, undergrounding, vegetation management, and mutual-aid restoration are ordinary parts of Florida utility engineering, and the restoration problem is a systems problem.
• Solar has grown very rapidly in Florida, and the state is now among the largest solar generators in the country — which puts the integration questions in these courses directly in front of in-state employers.
• The employers are named and local: Florida Power & Light (NextEra), Duke Energy Florida, TECO, JEA, OUC, and Gulf Power in UWF's own region, plus municipal and cooperative utilities across the state.
• ⚠ NERC reliability standards govern bulk power system operation, and compliance is a real job function — violations carry financial penalties.

FE exam relevance

The Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam is the first step toward Professional Engineer licensure, and in Florida it is administered under the Florida Board of Professional Engineers. Most students take the FE Electrical and Computer exam in their final year. Licensure matters less in electrical engineering than in civil — the industrial exemption means most electrical engineers in manufacturing and product work never need a PE — but it is required for consulting practice, for sealing designs, and for power and building-systems work, which is exactly where Florida's utility and infrastructure employment sits.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with analysis assignments and frequently a market or policy study.
• Typically taken in the third or fourth year as a technical elective.
• ⚠ Expect writing as well as calculation. Policy and market analysis is argued in prose, and assessments in this course frequently reflect that.
• UWF publishes no contact hours, lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course, and no material and supply fee is noted on this entry. Confirm the offering pattern with the department — at approximately two Florida institutions this is a narrow offering.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement. ⚠ For engineering specifically, ABET-accredited programmes commonly require that upper-division engineering coursework be taken in residence, so transferability of the credit and applicability to the degree are separate questions.

EEL4290 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.