The major difficulties in assessing market power in electricity wholesale spot markets mean that great weight should be placed upon assessing market outcomes against the fundamental determinants of supply demand and competition. In this spirit we study whether the New Zealand market has been a...

An increasing number of researchers attempt to model the behavior of electricity spot prices using statistical models commonly used to model financial asset prices. In this paper we reveal properties of electricity spot prices which such models cannot capture. Using six years of half-hourly...

Steen Videbeck presented a half day seminar in September 2003, Measuring and developing the performance of New Zealand's power market.

In this paper we develop a new approach to understanding the behavior of high frequency electricity spot prices. It treats electricity delivered at different times of the day as different commodities while recognizing that these commodities may be traded on a small number of intra-day markets....

Generators supplying electricity markets are subject to volatile input and output prices and uncertain fuel availability. Price-risk may be hedged to a considerable extent but fuel-risk - water flows in the case of hydro and gas availability in the case of thermal plants - may not be. We show...

Cooperatives and mutual organisational forms arise for reasons which include contracting problems between parties. Economic literature suggests a variety of allocated inefficiencies implied by these forms that largely have their origins in poor investment decisions. We demonstrate that a...

We present a model featuring irreversible investment uncertain future demand and capital prices and a regulator who sets the firm's output price at discrete intervals. Using this model we derive a closed-form solution for the firm's output price which ensures that whenever the regulator resets...

We show that regulators' price-setting rate base and allowed rate of return decisions are inextricably linked. Once regulators switch from traditional rate of return regulation the irreversibility of much infrastructure investment significantly alters the results of the usual approach to...

In September 2005 the New Zealand Commerce Commission (NZCC) released a document (TheWeighted Average Cost of Capital for Electricity Lines Businesses by Dr Martin Lally referred to as LINES hereafter) that estimates a weighted average cost of capital (WACC) for New Zealand electricity lines...