We review the recent empirical research concerning market power on the Nordic wholesale market for electricity, Nord Pool. There is no evidence of blatant and systematic exploitation of system level market power on Nord Pool. However, generation companies seem from time to time able to take...

Anecdotal evidence indicates that electricity producers use production failures to disguise strategic reductions of capacity in order to influence prices, but systematic evidence is lacking. We use a quasi-experimental set up and data from the Swedish energy market to examine such behavior. In a...

In most wholesale electricity markets generators must submit step-function offers of supply to a uniform price auction, and the market is cleared at the price of the most expensive offer needed to meet realised demand. Such markets can most elegantly be modelled as the pure-strategy, Nash...

We analyse in a theoretical framework the link between real-time and day-ahead market performance in a hydro-based and imperfectly competitive wholesale electricity market. Theoretical predictions of the model are tested on data from the Nordic power exchange, Nord Pool Spot (NPS).We reject the...

Studies have shown that many consumers and businesses fail to invest in energy efficiency improvements despite seemingly ample financial incentives to do so – the so called energy efficiency gap or paradox. Attempts to explain this gap often focus on searching costs, information frictions and...

A chain of replacement model is used to examine the effects of automobile taxes and of a scrappage premium on the life length of cars, and on the size of the car fleet. The predictions of the model are tested on data on the scrappage of cars in Sweden 1989-2002. The theoretical model predicts...

An important challenge facing many deregulated electricity markets is dealing with the increasing penetration of intermittent generation. Simulation studies have pointed to the advantages of trading closer to real-time with large amounts of intermittent generation. Using Danish data, I show...

Green certificates are the main instrument for promoting renewable electricity (RES-E) in Sweden. But certificates cover only a limited share of total RES-E production. Under partial coverage, crowding out may arise whereby costly new RES-E replaces inexpensive old RES-E. Granting certificates...

I analyze renewable electricity policy in a multinational electricity market with transmission investment. If national policy makers choose support schemes to maximize domestic welfare, then a trade policy motive arises operating independently of any direct benefit of renewable electricity. The...

We propose nuclear capacity auctions as a means to improve the incentives for investing in nuclear power. A properly designed auction would (i) allocate the license to the most efficient bidder; (ii) sell the license if and only if new nuclear power was socially optimal. In particular, capacity...