By 2050, the European Union aims to reduce greenhouse gases by more than 80 %. The EU member states have therefore declared to strongly increase the share of renewable energy sources (RES-E) in the next decades. Given a large deployment of wind and solar capacities, there are two major impacts...

The EU member states have declared to strongly increase the share of Renewable Energy Sources in the next decades. Given a large deployment of wind and solar capacities as well as limited cost-efficient storage technologies, this has two major impacts on electricity systems. First, the...

The German Energiewende’s potential effects on the reliability of electricity supply as well as the corresponding economic consequences have recently entered both the political and scientific debate. However, empirical evidence of power outage costs in Germany is rather scarce. Following a...

Since the 1990s, efficiency and benchmarking analysis has increasingly been used in network utilities research and regulation. A recurrent concern is the effect of environmental factors that are beyond the influence of firms (observable heterogeneity) and factors that are not identifiable...

Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries and is increasingly addressed in regulatory schemes. However, this important aspect is generally not reflected in efficiency analysis of these industries. In this paper we present an efficiency...

Seit der Deregulierung des deutschen Strommarktes im Jahre 1998 werden die Netznutzungsentgelte durch Verhandlungen zwischen den Energieerzeugern und den industriellen Nutzern festgelegt. Da die Stromnetze als nicht-bestreitbare natürliche Monopolisten anzusehen sind, können die Netzbetreiber...