Market Power in the Capacity Market? The Case of Ireland

Juha Teirila

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: An electricity market coupled with a capacity market is modelled as a two-stage game that allows for strategic behaviour both in the electricity market and in the capacity market. The model is applied to the Irish electricity market, where a capacity market based on reliability options is established by the end of 2017. As Ireland has one dominant firm in the electricity market, there have been concerns that the new market design provides it an opportunity to abuse market power in these two markets. Using Ireland as an example this article examines the kinds of strategic behaviours that can be expected if a capacity market is implemented in an imperfectly competitive market. It is found that the potential for the abuse of market power in the capacity market is significant for the dominant firm in Ireland and that there is no simple way to mitigate it. The relative amount of procured capacity, the amount and characteristics of potential entrants, and the competitiveness of the electricity market are the main determinants of the possibilities and incentives for abusing market power in the capacity market.

Keywords: capacity market; strategic behaviour; competitive benchmark analysis; procurement auction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 D44 H57 L13 L94 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-des, nep-ene, nep-ind and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe1727.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:1727

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().