Since the 1970s, high volumetric (per kilowatt-hour) electricity prices have been justified in many policy discussions as encouraging more efficient use of electricity and placing more of the cost burden on those who are less prudent in their use. The argument has been used in support of...

Economists, energy experts, and policymakers have called for accelerating investment in the U.S. electricity transmission network. Additional transmission lines could better integrate markets, reducing the total cost of electricity generation. They could also allow for the better integration of...

This paper discusses contributions that industrial organization economists have made to our understanding of energy markets and environmental regulation. We emphasize the substantive contributions of recent papers while also highlighting how this literature has adopted and sometimes augmented...

Energy security is the ability of households, businesses, and government to accommodate disruptions in supply in energy markets. This survey considers the economic dimensions of energy security, political and other non-economic security concerns and discusses policy approaches that could enhance...

In electricity markets, generators are rewarded both for providing energy and for enabling grid reliability. The two functions are compensated in separate markets: energy markets and ancillary services markets. We provide evidence of changes in the fuel mix in the energy market that is driven by...

Restructuring electricity markets has enabled wholesalers to exercise market power. Using a common method of measuring competitive behavior in these markets, several studies have found substantial inefficiencies. This method overstates actual welfare loss by ignoring production constraints that...

We examine the environmental impact of the post-2005 natural gas glut in the United States due to the shale gas boom. Our focus is on quantifying short-term coal-to-gas switching decisions by different types of electric power plants in response to changes in the relative price of the two fuels....

Most US consumers are charged a near-constant retail price for electricity, despite substantial hourly variation in the wholesale market price. The Smart Grid is a set of emerging technologies that, among other effects, will facilitate "real-time pricing" for electricity and increase price...

I make three points relating to the transition from fossil fuels to non-carbon energy. One is that the economic cost of moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy in electricity generation is very low, and probably lower than many estimates of the economic benefits from this change. The second...

Squaring hourly demand and wind-solar production data for Germany and a number of neighbouring countries with the results of the EU's ESTORAGE project, this paper studies the limits of Germany's energy revolution in view of the volatility of wind and solar power. In addition to pumped storage,...