A Clean Energy Standard (CES) is a flexible, market-based policy instrument that could be adopted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. electricity system over time. This paper uses several well-known energy system and electricity models to analyze a CES that reflects broad principles outlined in President Obama’s January 2011 State of the Union…
Author: admin
German Nuclear Policy Reconsidered: Implications for the Electricity Market
In the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima-Daiichi, German nuclear policy has been reconsidered. This paper demonstrates the economic effects of an accelerated nuclear phase-out in Germany on the European electricity market. An optimization model is used to analyze two scenarios with different lifetimes for nuclear plants in Germany (phase-out vs. prolongation). Based on…
Designing the European Gas Market: More Liquid & Less Natural?
Designing a gas market is defining how the commodity, the transmission and ancillary services are traded. The European Union has built the commoditization of natural gas through the socialization of several costs of trade. This choice aims at obtaining more liquid markets through the creation of virtual hubs of trade. These virtual hubs ignore most…
Marginal Costs with Wings a Ball and Chain Pipelines and Institutional Foundations for the U.S. Gas Market
The United States has highly competitive gas markets (spot and futures), showing prices in recent years that have definitively diverged from world oil prices. Those gas markets were not “built” in the manner of administered electricity markets. Rather, they were the result of a revolution in federal pipeline regulation designed purposely to free the gas…
Editorial
Support Schemes for Renewable Energy: An Economic Analysis
We consider leading approaches to the decarbonisation of electricity supply. Price supports through long term contracts, such as feed-in-tariffs have been very effective at eliciting rapid escalation of renewable supply, largely because risks have been transferred away from suppliers and tariffs have been generous. However, countries with the most ambitious programs of this type (Denmark,…
Can Bioenergy Assessments Deliver?
The role of biomass as a primary energy resource is highly debated. Next generation biofuels are suggested to be associated with low specific greenhouse gas emissions. But land consumption, demand for scarce water, competition with food production and harmful indirect land-use effects put a question mark over the beneficial effects of bioenergy deployment. In this…
Market and Policy Barriers to Deployment of Energy Storage
There has recently been resurgent interest in energy storage, due to a number of developments in the electricity industry. Despite this interest, very little storage, beyond some small demonstration projects, has been deployed recently. While technical issues, such as cost, device efficiency, and other technical characteristics are often listed as barriers to storage, there are…
Solar Integration
Solar energy can enter our energy systems through many doors and windows, mostly as heat and electricity. As costs go down, especially for photovoltaic electricity, the variability of the resource becomes a dominant issue.Interconnections,load management, flexible fossil or hydro power plants and storage capacities of pumped hydro plants combine to make the daily variability manageable,…
Contracting for Wind Generation
The UK Government proposes offering long-term Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs) to low-carbon generation to reduce risk and encourage new entrants. Their preference is for a Contract-for-Difference (CfD) for all generation regardless of type. I argue that a standard CfD is unsuitable for on-shore wind, where a fixed FiT appears less risky. The estimated extra trading and balancing…