Energy and climate policies are usually seen as measures to internalize externalities. However, as a side effect, these policies redistribute wealth between consumers and producers, and within these groups. While redistribution is seldom the focus of the academic literature in energy economics,...

Energy and climate policies are usually seen as measures to internalize externalities. However, as a side effect, these policies redistribute wealth between consumers and producers, and within these groups. While redistribution is seldom the focus of the academic literature in energy economics,...

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...

Previous studies have noted that, surprisingly, Germany’s dramatic expansion of wind and solar energy coincided with a reduction of short-term balancing reserves. This paper provides further and updated evidence, supporting this “German Balancing Paradox”: since 2011 wind and solar energy...

Most production processes can be turned off easily during times of low demand; this is not true for the generation of electricity. For a number of technical reasons, a certain number of conventional (thermal) power stations needs to keep producing electricity at all times, despite negative...

Upon discussion of price setting on electricity wholesale markets, many refer to the so-called merit order model. Conventional wisdom holds that during most hours of the year, coal- or natural gas-fired power plants set the price on European markets. In this context, this paper analyses price...

This paper proposes a game-theoretic model to analyze the strategic behavior of inc-dec gaming in market-based congestion management (redispatch). We extend existing models by considering incomplete information about competitors’ costs and a finite set of providers. We find that these...

Control power (regulating power, balancing power) is used to quickly restore the supply-demand balance in power systems. Variable renewable energy sources (VRE) such as wind and solar power are often thought to increase the reserve requirement significantly. This paper provides a comprehensive...

The economics of electricity is shaped by its physics. A well know example is the non-storability of electricity that causes its price to fluctuate widely. More generally, physical constraints cause electricity to be a heterogeneous good along three dimensions - time, space, and lead-time....

The income that wind and solar power receive on the market is affected by the variability of their output. At times of high availability of the primary energy source, they supply electricity at zero marginal costs, shift the supply curve (merit-order curve) to the right and thereby reduce the...