We raise the question if improvements to current energy-only markets are sufficient to maintain resource adequacy in electricity markets or whether the rapid increase in wind and solar power gives stronger arguments for additional capacity mechanisms. A comparative analysis between Europe and the United States reveals some fundamental differences, but also many similarities in electricity…
2020
OPEC’s Pursuit of Market Stability
We investigate attempts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to stabilize the price of oil during the past fifty years. We first develop a novel decomposition of shifts in global demand and non-OPEC supply. This decomposition provides a fresh perspective on the debate over the relative importance of demand versus supply factors as…
Polar Vortexes in New England: Missing Money, Missing Markets, or Missing Regulation?
The 2014 and 2017-18 “polar vortex” events in New England served as virtual controlled experiments on how competitive natural gas and electricity markets coexist uneasily almost two decades after different kinds of regulatory restructuring initiatives freed different kinds of competitive forces to support the supply infrastructure in each energy market. As a region with no…
The Impact of Intermittent Power Generation on the Wholesale Electricity Prices of the MIBEL Iberian Market
This study addresses the effect of intermittent renewable energy generation on the dynamics of electricity prices of the Iberian market (Spain and Portugal) during the period 2010-2015. The results indicate that intermittent renewable energy has a material negative effect on electricity price, consistent with the presence of a merit-order effect. Still, that effect varies with…
Natural Gas markets in the European Union: Testing Resilience
The liberalization and integration of natural gas markets in Europe have resulted in gas-to-gas competition on a European scale with closely related natural gas prices in the various markets. More recently, the European Union aims to become a resilient energy union which may call for additional policy measures. In this paper we discuss the need…
Shale Gas and Oil Development: A Review of the Local Environmental, Fiscal, and Social Impacts
In the early 2000s, advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies led to a veritable boom in the extraction of natural gas and oil from shale plays. In this review article, we discuss the local, state, and federal regulatory context in which this shale gas and oil production occurs and review how it affects…
Beyond the inverted U-shape: Challenging the long-term relationship of the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis
This paper empirically tests the validity of the postulated Environmental Kuznets Curve for a panel of 69 countries from 1971 to 2014 which are clustered into all-, high-, middle-, and lower-income groupings. Since the quadratic EKC specification between carbon dioxide emissions and GDP produces highly biased results in favour of an inverted U-shaped pattern, we…
A Regionalized or Unified Oil Market: The Price Spread Between Brent and WTI
I evaluate the degree to which local supply/demand conditions and exchange rates affect the price for WTI and Brent and their price spread by estimating cointegrating vector autoregression (CVAR) models and using a saturation indicator technique to identify periods when these long- and short-run relations change. A bivariate CVAR model that includes the price of…