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…
Number 2
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…
Resource Adequacy with Increasing Shares of Wind and Solar Power: A Comparison of European and U.S. Electricity Market Designs
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…
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…
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…
Book Reviews
Geopolitics and the Oil Price Cycle – An Introduction
Oil prices experienced record volatility in the spring of 2020 amid two separate, but simultaneous shocks—the largest singular, sudden drop in oil demand in history amid lockdowns across the world to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and a brief oil price war among the world’s largest oil producers. The gyration was the latest…
The Ephemeral Brent Geopolitical Risk Premium
We study the changing relationship between Brent oil prices and geopolitical risk, conditional on physical oil market conditions. We conduct the analysis at three frequencies, medium (1-3 years), high (2-3 months), and very high (daily), using three complementary techniques at the different levels (respectively, continuous wavelet partial coherence, VAR and GARCH-MIDAS) over the period April…
The Synergies Between EU Climate and Renewable Energy Policies-Evidence from Portugal Using Integrated Modelling
In the current debate about the cost-effectiveness of the EU climate and energy policy, the coexistence of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction and renewable energy targets, as well as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), have been subject to some criticism. In this paper we explore the interactions between EU climate and renewable energy targets…