Theory and empirics suggest that by curbing competition, incumbent electricity companies which used to be and here are referred to as Vertically Integrated Utilities (VIUs), can increase their profitability through combined ownership of generation and transmission and/or distribution networks....

When building a cross-border transmission line (a so-called interconnector) as a for-profit (merchant) project, where the regulator has required that capacity allocation be done non-discriminatorily by explicit auction, the identity of the investor can affect the profitability of the...

In the EU electricity industry, many Vertically Integrated Utilities (VIUs) have ownership both of electricity generators and of transmission, hence VIU-owned or allied generators often are bidders in auctions for VIU-owned transmission. In Van Koten (2006) I show that welfare suffers and the...

When a bidder (referred to as the privileged bidder) is residual claimant to a part of the revenue from an auction with two bidders whose valuations are independently and identically distributed, bidding incentives are changed. Specifically, the privileged bidder will bid more aggressively to...

Onshore, generators are connected to the transmission grid by TSOs. This regulatory model could simply be extended to offshore (i.e. Germany), but the connection of offshore wind farms to shore is also an opportunity to test alternatives, i.e. the third party model (i.e. the UK) or the generator...

The creation of competitive wholesale electricity markets allows to evaluate the “arbitrage value” of an electricity storage unit, which stems from buying and storing electricity when prices are low, and selling it when prices are high. The focus of this paper is to demonstrate that the...

This paper discusses the relevant cost standard for the economic replicability test for Next-Generation Access (NGA) networks, described in the Recommendation on Costing and Non-discrimination adopted by the European Commission. According to the Recommendation itself, in order to reconcile...