Seminar

Masterclass on Empirical Industrial Organization for Electricity Markets

Mario Samano

May 9, 2022, 17:00–18:30

Room Auditorium 4

Industrial Organization seminar

Abstract

Electricity is a fundamental commodity in any country's economy. The allocation of electricity relies on complex engineering achievements and rules and mechanisms that are a direct application of economics concepts. This mini-course consists of two parts. First, we will discuss general market issues. The electricity sector is typically divided into generation, transmission, and distribution. We will give an overview of those and some of the empirical IO techniques to study them. The second part focuses on renewable energy sources (RES) and electricity storage. Specifically, we will talk about intermittency of RES, policies to incentivize the adoption of RES with an emphasis on Feed-in-Tariffs, procurement auctions and Feed-in-Premiums, and the role of utility-scale batteries. Throughout these examples we make use of data from different markets: Ontario, Arizona, Germany, and California.