This paper is the first in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. The Wolak report concluded that there had been a cumulative total of $4.3b (NZD) of overcharging in the New Zealand wholesale market over a period of seven years....

Modelling price formation in electricity markets is a notoriously difficult process, due to physical constraints on electricity generation and flow. This difficulty has inspired the recent development of bottom-up agent-based models of electricity markets. While these have proven quite...