Forecasting Auction Prices in Illinois

Illinois Citizens Utility Board
Completed September 2006

In 2006, the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) voted to allow Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) to use an auction system to purchase power. In preparation for Illinois’ first auction in January 2007, Synapse performed market analyses to forecast the auction’s likely results. In performing this analysis, Synapse considered the various components that comprise electricity prices, including load cycles, capacity costs, ancillary services such as spinning reserves, anticipated congestion costs or costs of FTRs to hedge congestion risk, other risk costs, and price effects of the PJM Reliability Pricing Model (RPM). Project completed in September 2006.