Several patterns emerge from a review of historical developments in the electricity industry: (1) conflicts arise from a number of sources; (2) responses to events and perceived crises tend to involve national (and state) legislation; (3) a lack of broad public (and political) consensus regarding the appropriate role of market mechanisms vs. government regulations; (4) absence of significant ch...

This paper contains a dynamic conduct parameter model to look at the pricing behavior of five power marketers in the California Power Exchange (CalPX) on daily data for 2000. Only our previous paper Hodge and Dahl (2012) specifically focused on just the electric power marketers. In this paper we compare a dynamic conduct parameter with that of our earlier static model to test whether the static...

Natural gas power plants can further specify their procurement contracts with pipeline distributors using a firm contract option that guarantees delivery at an additional cost. Using transaction level data from 2008-2012 we empirically test what characteristics lead to use of firm contracts and how the premium for firm contracts changes with these characteristics. Using variation in power plant...

Despite the positive effect electricity grids separated from generation and supply by ownership are expected to have on the level of competition in the non-network activities, several EU member states still adhere to a solely legally unbundled transmission grid. This choice might be induced by regulators focusing on objectives other than the promotion of consumer interests: theoretically analyz...

I show that provision of electricity meters leads to a large reduction in electricity consumption over the first four months following meter installation. This is consistent with previous overconsumption by unmetered users facing a zero marginal price. However, it also reflects underconsumption by metered customers paying a marginal price exceeding marginal cost. I quantify these welfare effect...

This paper examines the incentives that generation firms have in restructured electricity markets for supporting long-term transmission investments. In particular, we study whether generation firms, which arguably play a dominant role in the restructured electricity markets, have the incentives to fund or support social-welfare-improving transmission investments. We examine this question and ex...

The first part of this paper establishes some new pieces of evidence on the dynamics of prices and volumes in wholesale electricity day-ahead markets (NordPool, APX, Powernext). The growth of prices is more strongly autocorrelated than the growth of volumes; it is more more heavy-tailed; and its conditional standard deviation decays like the reciprocal of the price level (1/P scaling). In the s...

This study presents an empirical analysis of the cost efficiency of a sample of Swiss multi-utilities operating in the distribution of electricity, natural gas and water. The multi-utilities that operate in different sectors are characterized by a strong unobserved heterogeneity. Therefore the measurement of their performance poses an important challenge for the regulators. The purpose of this ...

generators’ risks Richard Green Institute for Energy Research and Policy University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT Tel: +44 121 415 8216 Email: [email protected] October 2007 Abstract Volatile fuel prices affect both the cost and price of electricity in a liberalized market. Generators with the price-setting technology will face less risk to their profit margins than those with costs that...

Article history: Received 17 December 2014 Received in revised form 26 August 2015 Accepted 24 November 2015 Available online 18 December 2015 The growth of fossil fuel power production and the consequent increase in the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have set off an alarm signal worldwide. Different policies have been implemented to incentivize the development of renewable energy sour...