Abstract:Currently the electricity markets in China and other countries are faced with new rounds of reforms. The design of trading system and market rules are the key issues in market reform. However, the concepts and methodology of electricity market design have not been established in China yet. The concept of "electricity market design science" is proposed in this paper, which is related to multidisciplinary knowledge of power system engineering, operations research, microeconomics, game theory, auction theory, finance, computational economics and experimental economics, etc. The electricity market design takes the Political Economy of Socialism with Chinese Characteristic as the overall guiding ideology, sets up the system view and employs the system engineering method, and the specific design process includes the preliminary design of the market system based on classical microeconomics and finance, trading mechanism design based on the auction theory and game theory, electricity market simulation based on computational economics and experimental economics, and field research on real-world market trading. The basic methodology of electricity market design science has been applied to the design of regional electricity market system and transaction variety in Southern China. It contains profound and rich contents which is yet to be further studied and applied.