Important Role of Power Exchange in Conducting Futures Market for Stabilizing Electric Power Industry in Transition

At present the electric power industry in Korea is going through a major restructuring process. The restructuring is motivated by a desire to reduce electricity supply costs, to attract new in-vestment in modern generation, transmission and distribution facilities, and to stimulate innovation in the wholesale production and the retail supply of electricity. The experience to date shows that restructuring of electric power industry in the US, however, is marred with a number of problematic market performances including unreasonably high prices at wholesale. This paper investigates the important role of Power Exchange for stabilizing electric power industry in transition by offering various financial products. These financial products are used for risk hedging by the market participants. The paper focuses on the risk hedging by an individual supplier and derives an explicit decision rule that incorporates the attitude towards the risks. In addition to providing the financial products for risk hedging by market participants, the Power Exchange plays another very important role of financial safeguard system. Because of its unique characteristics, the Power Exchange is well suited for financial surveillance where it performs the early detection of unsound financial (and to a large extent operational) practices on the part of any system users and protect the system integrity and the market participants from the consequences of a default in the clearing structure.