Three Essays on Capacity Payment Mechanisms in Wholesale Electricity Markets

Download or read book Three Essays on Capacity Payment Mechanisms in Wholesale Electricity Markets written by David Brown and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Administrative price-caps put in place to limit market power execution and politically disastrous price-spikes limits firms' revenues from electricity markets. This creates long-term distortions that lead to underinvestment in electricity generation capacity. Capacity Payment Mechanisms aim to promote generation capacity investment by providing payments to generation units in addition to the firms' expected earnings from subsequent electricity markets. To date there has been a plethora of policy discussions debating the appropriate design of these capacity payment mechanisms. However, little rigorous academic work has been allocated to analyze the performance of these Capacity Payment Mechanisms. The first chapter models firms' bidding behavior in multi-unit capacity auctions, one of the most widely-used Capacity Payment Mechanisms. In particular, I take into account that the allocation of capacity in the auction affects the firms' expected profit levels in subsequent electricity market interactions. I find that incumbent generators may construct new generation capacity for a loss in order to deter entrants.