## 1 Introduction  
Economic Dispatch is the implementation of electric generators based on the short-run marginal cost of production (e.g., generator fuel, variable operation, and maintenance expense). Prior to wholesale deregulation, electric utilities applied economic dispatch for their service territories. In some cases, utilities pooled generation resources to serve regional areas comprising several states (e.g., New England Power Pool). In Texas, economic dispatch is performed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Among other things, the ERCOT ensures that wholesale energy supply requirements are attained through day-ahead and real-time markets in a least-cost fashion. Since the early 2000s, in Texas, there has been a concerted effort to reduce the cost of electricity in an environmentally friendly way by stimulating the growth of renewable energy resources--wind and solar, in addition to baseload generation, namely nuclear energy. The costs of building renewable energy facilities are extremely high. But since these renewables rely only on wind or solar energy to generate electricity, their marginal costs of production depend only on maintenance and operation costs. Moreover, the Texas tax code chapter 313 also aimed at lowering capital or investment costs. Chapter 313 offers school districts the opportunity to provide even more benefits to businesses. It does so by offering a 10-year limit, ranging from USD 10m to USD 100m, on the taxable value of a new investment project in manufacturing or certain green energy projects [1]. Table 1 displays the cost of building renewable resources in the state of Texas. These are costs excluding battery storage. Adding a 60 MW/240-megawatt-hour (MWH) storage system to a 100 MW photovoltaic (PV) system costs between USD 171m and USD 173m [2]. The cost estimates in Table 1 refer only to capital investment, and not to fixed O&M expenses, that is, expenses incurred regardless of how much a resource is used. While investment costs for solar and wind facilities are high, fixed O&M expenses are relatively lower compared to those of nuclear plants. _The aims and contributions of this paper_: A key principle underlying Economic Dispatch is the notion of the Merit-Order Effect (MOE), which ranks electricity generation from the lowest to the highest marginal cost of production: the lowest cost sources of generation are the first ones to be dispatched to meet demand. Thus, based on the MOE, increasing the supply of renewable energy resources during peak demand hours of the day, ceteris paribus, should result in lowering the wholesale price per MWh of electricity produced. The MOE metric is widely used in practice, and several researchers have studied its importance in the energy industry. [PERSON] et al. (2011) quantified the MOE of renewable energy and cogeneration on electricity prices in Spain [5]. [PERSON] et al. (2008) provided a detailed analysis of the MOE on renewable electricity generation on spot market prices in Germany [6]. [PERSON] et al. (2014) found that the total MOE from wind generation resulted in a significant reduction in the price per MWh of electricity between 2008 and 2012 in Germany [7]. [PERSON] et al. (2020), using quantile regressions, quantified the MOE of variable renewable energy technologies in the Turkish electricity market [8]. [PERSON] et al. (2022) used the MOE to construct hedging strategies, with the aim of minimizing risk due to volatilities in electricity prices [9]. Using quantile models, [PERSON] et al. (2021) examined how the MOE varies with the level of wholesale electricity prices within the ERCOT [10]. Several researchers have also contributed to the literature on favorable governmental policies that have helped produce cleaner energy. These policies included low-cost financing, business-friendly tax policies, CO\({}_{2}\) emission standards, carbon trading, interregional transmission connections, etc. ; see: [11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17].