firms, all data necessary to operate the spot market and the transmission network should be publicly released as soon as possible after the trading day.

An additional benefit of public data release is that all market participants are aware that their bids, schedules and output levels are publicly available. The fact that their behavior is directly observable is likely to make detection of market rule violations more straightforward. Any interested party can monitor the behavior of any market participant using this publicly available data.

Despite the many market performance advantages of public data release, few markets do so. The Australian NEM is one of the few markets that follows a data release policy of full disclosure the next trading day of all bids, schedules and output levels. FERC has adopted as very peculiar data release policy in the US. Bids, schedules and output levels are released with a six month lag, but market participant identities masked. This data release policy renders the resulting data significantly less useful for analysis of market performance and for providing sunshine regulation of the behavior of market participants. If a firm knows that its behavior is publicly observable, even with a six month lag, it will be less likely to engage in behavior that may cause public outcry. FERC’s data release policy of concealing the identity of the market participant gives each market participant the ability to deny that they are engaging in the behavior found to exist for one or more firms. Each firm can always claim that they are not the ones engaging in this behavior or they are not the one engaging in the most objectionable form of this behavior.

Perhaps the best example of how public data release could have significantly enhanced the effectiveness of a regulatory process occurred during the California crisis. Because of data confidentiality restrictions it was impossible for the public, including the press, to analyze the bidding behavior of specific market participants. Although confidential reports on bidding behavior and market outcomes were submitted to FERC by the DMA throughout the crisis period, FERC was effectively able to ignore these analyses of bidding behavior because its data confidentiality requirements prevented these studies from being made available to other interested parties and the public. Had both the DMA and MSC studies, and the data they were based on, been released to the public immediately, it is difficult to see how the crisis would have lasted as long as it did. The public could have directly verified the levels of bids being submitted by all market participants and made their own assessment of the extent of the market power problem in the California market. The unwillingness of FERC to permit the release of the bid, schedule and settlement data from the California ISO prevented an open analysis and discussion of the causes of the California crisis. Instead, the crisis was allowed to continue because FERC did not take action based on the studies prepared by the DMA and MSC and it did not undertake its own analysis of the confidential data until the crisis period was largely over.

The UK Pool and New Zealand market had the policy of only releasing data to other members of the market. The UK Pool would allow other parties to purchase portions of the data at extremely high prices. The New Zealand market did not even 15