Germany is struggling to meet its 2020 greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and climate goals. Against this background, we analyze the current draft National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) that sets out how Germany aims to achieve its national and European climate goals by 2030. We introduce the...

This paper presents an approach for resilience incentives in the regulation of electricity network operators. Resilience is the ability of the power system to deal quickly and efficiently with large-scale and long-lasting power interruptions. It comprises two related aspects: minimizing the...

Market design for electricity often ignores network congestion initially and addresses it in a second, so-called 'redispatch' stage. For market participants, any two-stage design offers an opportunity to strategically optimize between the different market stages. The current debate is how to...

The market-based procurement of system services for network operators is gaining momentum in the current debate about the future market design in the energy sector. Since current sources of reactive power are primarily fossil-fuel power plants which will not be available in a carbon neutral...

This article presents an approach to minimize the outage costs during power supply disruptions and, thus, to incentivize efficient resilience investment by network users. The central problem to be solved is the information asymmetry between network operators and network users on outage and...

The next years should bring about a rapid transformation of the electricity sector towards high levels of renewable generation. Smart grids are seen as the silver bullet responding to the challenge of integrating renewables, managing flexibility, and keeping the costs down in distribution...

How should we select winning bids of generation units for strategic reserves that consist of capacity bids and energy bids? In this paper, we analyze two selecting mechanisms (scoring rules): "simultaneous" and "sequential". In case of a simultaneous scoring rule, capacity and energy bids are...

What is a good balance between competition and coordination in network industries? Network unbundling aims to promote competition, but this has to be balanced against the downside of unbundling: firm-internal coordination falls away and must be replaced by external market mechanisms. This is a...

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the impact of vertical unbundling on German electric utilities. Our research mainly relies on in-depth interviews with sector-experts from the German utilities. We will discuss both short-term changes and the long-term impact on competition in the...

This article analyses cross-border effects of capacity mechanisms and discusses whether such mechanisms countervail the goals of European Market Integration. Using a two-country-model, the countries' policy options are analysed from a game-theoretical viewpoint. A model simulation identifies the...