To meet future energy demand growth and replace older or inefficient units, a large number of fossil fuel-fired plants will need to bebuilt worldwide in the next decade. Yet CO2 emissions from fossil-fired power generation are a major contributor to climate change. As a result, new plants must...

This report looks at how investors have responded to the need to internalise investment risk in power generation and how these responses have affected the organisation of the power sector and technology choices. This study looks at several cases of volatile prices in IEA countries’ electricity...

Most IEA countries are liberalising their electricity markets, shifting the responsibility for financing new investment in power generation to private investors. No longer able to automatically pass on costs to consumers, and with future prices of electricity uncertain, investors face a much...

Highly volatile electricity prices are becoming a more frequent and unwanted characteristic of modern electricity wholesale markets. But low demand elasticity, mainly the result of a lack of incentives and consumers’ inability to control demand, means that consumer behaviour is not reflected...

Electric power in OECD countries is mostly produced by large central generating stations, then transmitted along high voltage lines to local distribution systems that carry it to final consumers. Distributed generation plants are different. They produce power on an electricity consumer’s own...

Feed-in tariffs (FITs) are prevalent support policies for scaling up renewable electricity capacity. They are market-based economic instruments, which typically offer long-term contracts that guarantee a price to be paid to a producer of a pre-determined source of electricity per kWh fed into...

Feed-in tariffs (FITs) are prevalent support policies for scaling up renewable electricity capacity. They are market-based economic instruments, which typically offer long-term contracts that guarantee a price to be paid to a producer of a pre-determined source of electricity per kWh fed into...