Biography
Frank A. Wolak is the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His fields of specialization are Energy and Environmental Economics, Regulatory Economics, and Econometric Theory. His recent work focuses on market design and regulatory oversight for infrastructure industries—electricity, natural gas, freight rail, gasoline, postal delivery, telecommunications, and water delivery—and on assessing the impacts of these policies on suppliers and final consumers. Wolak has been Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) for more than 30 years.
From January 1998 to April of 2011, Wolak was the Chair of the Market Surveillance Committee (MSC) of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). The MSC is the independent market monitor for the California electricity supply industry. From January 2012 to December 2013, Wolak was a member of the Emissions Market Advisory Committee (EMAC) for California’s Market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions allowances. This committee advised the California Air Resources Board on the design and monitoring of the state’s cap-and-trade market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions allowances.
Wolak directs the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) in the Freeman-Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies at Stanford. Over the past 15 years, Wolak and PESD scholars have designed and built innovative tools to educate audiences with diverse backgrounds about energy markets and electricity supply industries in particular. The Energy Market Game (EMG) is an online game where teams play against one another as generation unit owners, electricity traders, electricity retailers, and electricity consumers in a variety of market scenarios.
To provide an accessible introduction to foundational concepts in electricity supply industry to a diverse audience, Wolak and PESD scholars developed highly interactive e-learning modules (30–60 minutes per module), aimed at teaching a specific set of market principles. These modules provide a common vocabulary and understanding of electricity market operation. The e-learning modules and the EMG helps participants gain a higher level of comfort with these markets, as well as an improved sense of how market outcomes change in response to different market designs.
The wide variety of the market designs that can be considered in the EMG allows participants to prototype proposed changes in their wholesale, retail and financial market designs before they are actually implemented. Regulators, energy agency staff, and other stakeholders can use EMG games played under different market designs to understand how changes in market designs are likely impacts markets outcomes in their own electricity supply industry. Wolak and scholars at PESD are increasingly using the EMG for this policy-prototyping process.
Wolak’s recent book, The Future of Electricity Retailing and How We Get There with Ian Hardman addresses many of the current challenges with sunk cost recovery and distribution grid upgrades to accommodate distributed generation and electric vehicle charging infrastructure facing the electricity retailing sector.
