The European Union’s Energy Efficiency Directive calls for EU Member States to put in place ambitious energy efficiency policies and requires them to establish energy saving targets. One of the most important Articles of the Directive is Article 7, which required Member States to implement Energy Efficiency Obligations and/or alternative policy instruments in order to…
Regulatory impact on Quality of Electricity Distribution Services: The case of Latin America and the Caribbean
In this study, we empirically estimate the impact of quality regulation based on economic incentives on the frequency and duration of power outages. First, based on a sample of 143 electricity distributors across Latin America and the Caribbean, we show that between 2003 and 2019, the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and the System…
Policy Reversals in Transitional Markets: The Effect of Changing Marginal Cost to Physical Order Dispatch in the Mexican Power Sector
This study explores the 2021 Mexican electric reform that proposes changing the power dispatch from a marginal-cost-based to a command-and-control physical system. The new law forces the state power company to dispatch before private generators. We use the GENeSYS-MOD techno-economic energy model to determine the reform’s effect on the power sector’s generation mix, energy emissions,…
Electricity Markets in Transition and Crisis: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Security
Two electricity market crises following the lifting of post-Covid restrictions in 2021 and the natural gas supply interruptions in 2022, challenged the functioning of the EU electricity market and its design. This paper argues that the market design was already ripe for an overhaul as the efficient market paradigm has gradually become an instrument of…
From Negative to Positive Carbon Pricing in Mexico
Coping with Uncertainties in the Electricity Sector – Methods for Decisions of Different Scope
Decision-making in the energy sector and notably the power industry has to cope with multiple uncertain factors such as renewable forecasts, technology developments or demand growth. At the same time, multiple methods are available to support decision-making under uncertainty. The focus of the present review is to identify the merits of different optimization modelling approaches…
Towards Electricity Markets’ Integration and Investment in Transmission Capacity: East African Community Power Markets
This research examines the impact of transmission expansion on a future East Africa’s electricity market, to enable the five examined countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi) to adequately couple. As a pioneering move, we introduce nodal pricing and investigate the economic welfare arising from the planned transmission upgrade. This simulation is then compared to…
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…
Prosumage of solar electricity: pros, cons, and the system perspective
We examine the role of prosumage of solar electricity, i.e. PV self-generation combined with distributed storage, in the context of the low-carbon energy transformation. First, we devise a qualitative account of arguments in favor of and against prosumage. Second, we give an overview of prosumage in Germany. Prosumage will likely gain momentum as support payments…