In Germany, substantial drops in wholesale power prices have become a regular phenomenon. While such price drops have far-reaching implications for the functioning of the power market, their underlying determinants remain poorly understood. To fill this gap, we propose a Markov regime-switching...

In the wake of the Paris agreement, France has set a zero net greenhouse gas emission target by 2050. This target can only be achieved by rapidly decreasing the share of fossil fuels and accelerating the deployment of low-carbon technologies. We develop a detailed model of the power sector to...

New well drilling technologies, when utilized to fracture common shale formations promise to provide access to very large volumes of gas. Indeed, the trade press and news media have generally taken the position that “fracgas” over the next decade can add up to 800 trillion cubic feet of...

The theory of infinitely repeated games finds that players will likely learn to collude, given sufficient incentive to do so, enabling them to capture greater payoffs than those attainable in the static setting. The theory posits that cooperation can arise in this framework if individuals...

Industrial consolidation is a global trend that evolved during the last three decades. Market liberalisation and privatisation represent initial key transformation processes for this phenomenon in the energy sector. The energy sector moved over to common interest during the last years: The...

After two decades of attempts to deregulate the Indian power sector and bring in more competition, the question we are asking is: why has private investment not flooded in as expected? We analyze the problem using an economics of governance framework which suggests that various organizational...

This paper provides a technical primer for the energy economist wishing to study the optimal power flow problem, but, who like this paper’s author, find it difficult to simply plow through Schweppe et al. (1988). This paper’s aim is to provide the reader with sufficient technical background...

A number of renewable electricity generating technologies have not reached grid-parity in terms of cost. These include solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, tidal, wave, ocean, onshore wind and offshore wind power (new renewables henceforth). It is noticeable that the share of electricity from...

Electricity markets are complex; they involve long lead-times, include feedbacks that are generally hard to interpret and are influenced by environmental concerns and political objectives. After liberalization, the markets moved from a monopoly situation with a single service provider and...

European electricity markets are geographically organized in zones, which often resemble countries. Overload of power lines within zones have to be relieved through other means than the electricity market, e.g. so-called “redispatching” of power plants. Traditionally, this has often been...