• Energy Research

The large-scale integration of renewable energy sources requires flexibility from power markets in the sense that the latter should quickly counterbalance the renewable supply variation driven by weather conditions. Most power markets cannot (yet) provide this flexibility effectively as they suffer from inelastic demand and insufficient flexible storage capacity or flexible conventional suppliers. Research accordingly shows that the volume of renewable energy in the supply system affects the mean and volatility of power prices. We extend this view and show that the level of wind and solar energy supply affects the tails of the electricity price distributions as well and that it does so asymmetrically. The higher the supply from wind and solar energy sources, the fatter the left tail of the price distribution and the thinner the right tail. This implies that one cannot rely on symmetric price distributions for risk management and for valuation of (flexible) power assets. The evidence in this paper suggests that we have to rethink the methods of subsidizing variable renewable supply such that they take into consideration also the flexibility needs of power markets.

The European Union Trading Scheme gives emission allowances a market price and are a marginal cost factor for power plants that run on polluting fuels. Power plants include these costs while determining the selling price of their output. Sold on a market place, it is sensible to expect that electricity market prices do reflect the prices of emission rights. The pass-through rate measures the fraction of the price of an emission right passed through to the electricity market price and is often assumed to be constant. Depending on different demand levels between and over days, we expect that the pass-through rate should vary and not be constant as the market clearing price is determined by different marginal producers who differ in terms of emission intensity. We therefore test the hypothesis that pass-through rates are constant and find strong support, using futures prices from the U.K. and Germany, for rejecting this hypothesis against the alternative that pass-through rates are non- constant and vary over time. From a policy perspective, the finding that the internalization of the costs of carbon emission allowances is not fully and time-varying implies that policy makers should be careful analyzing the effectiveness of the EU ETS policy.

Understanding power prices dynamics is crucial for valuing flexibility assets such as storage or flexible consumption facilities that accommodate fluctuations in power supply from variable renewables. Owners of such assets need to know how extreme power prices can become in order to optimally manage (dis)charging or adjusting consumption volumes. We examine how to predict those high and low prices, being the different quantiles of the power price probability distribution function, and question how supply from variable renewable sources affect different quantile prices. The first contribution of our paper is that we apply quantile regressions in a panel data framework. This methodology acknowledges that day-ahead power markets’ data is structured as cross-sectional data and, as opposed to previous quantile regression techniques introduced in power markets, allows for simultaneous predictions for all hours during a delivery day. Day-ahead power prices for all 24 h in the next day are determined at the same moment, one day before delivery. The hourly data is therefore not a time-series, but a cross section. The second contribution is that we examine the interaction between demand and supply from variable renewable sources, instead of linear dependencies only. We find that lower and higher quantile prices are more heavily affected by variations in supply from variable renewable sources than centre quantile prices. This enables owners of flexibility assets to better manage their assets in anticipation of excess or scarce supply from renewable sources. By doing so, they increase the flexibility of power systems that face increasing installed capacity of variable renewable energy sources.

Research shows that municipalities that face more risk from climate change have higher financing costs than municipalities that face less risk. However, to our best knowledge, it is unknown whether the adaptive capacity of a municaplity is re-warded in terms of lower financing costs. We study municipal bonds issued by U.S. municipalities that are known to face risk from climate change and examine whether the climate risk mitigating role of adaptive capacity is recognized by lower issuance costs. We do find a negative relationship between adaptive capacity and bond issuance costs. We conclude that cities having policies to improve adaptive capacity are likely to be paid off by lower funding costs.

Abstract Burer and Wustenhagen (2009) examined the preferences of 60 clean-tech venture capital and private equity investors regarding renewable energy and climate policies in 2007. This paper presents the results of a research project that examined whether these investor preferences changed due to the financial crisis. We re-conducted that part of Burer and Wustenhagen (2009) survey that focuses on the preferences for 12 market-pull policies. Comparing our results with those from 2007, we found that the popularity of 11 out of 12 policies decreased. The decrease was significant for those policies that involve subsidies and trade related schemes such as CO 2 emissions and green certificates trading. The decrease in the popularity of the policies was mainly the result of changes in the preferences of European investors, whereas the preferences of North American investors did not change noteworthy.

The goal of this paper is to examine to what extent electricity futures prices contain expected risk premiums or have power to forecast spot prices and whether this might be dependent on the type of electricity supply. We analyse futures prices from the Dutch market, a market in which power is produced with storable fossil fuels, and futures prices from the NordPool market, where electricity is mostly produced by hydropower. We show that futures prices from markets in which electricity is predominantly produced by imperfectly storable fuels such as hydro, wind and solar contain information about expected changes in the spot price of electricity, whereas futures prices from markets in which electricity is predominantly produced with perfectly storable fuels contain information about both expected price changes and time-varying risk premiums. These findings provide insight in the applicability of forward price models; one cannot apply the same model to all electricity markets. Forward models for markets with imperfect indirect storability should depend heavily on price expectations and models should include time-varying risk premiums for markets with perfect indirect storability.

textabstractIt is well known that day-ahead prices in power markets exhibit spikes. These spikes are sudden increases in the day-ahead price that occur because power production is not flexible enough to respond to demand and/or supply shocks in the short term. This paper focuses on how temperature influences the probability on a spike. The paper shows that the difference between the actual and expected temperature significantly influences the probability on a spike and that the impact of temperature on spike probability depends on the season.

textabstractThis paper examines the robustness of the results found by Douglas and Popova (2008). They examine the electricity forward premium in relation to gas storage inventories and find that, although electricity is not directly storable, electricity forward premiums are lower when gas storage inventories are higher, especially on days with high temperatures. Douglas and Popova (2008) derive their results from a forward premium model that is an extension of the Bessembinder and Lemmon (2002) model. We examine the robustness of their results, by examining whether the gas storage inventory results hold under a different specification of the forward risk premium. Our result support the results found by Douglas and Popova (2008) and show that their results are not influenced by the specification of the forward premium model.