The Cost of Energy Review and its implementation

Dieter Helm

Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2019, vol. 35, issue 2, 244-259

Abstract: The Cost of Energy Review recommended that, in the face of radical technical change, government should: move towards an Equivalent Firm Power capacity auction, integrating the renewables; establish independent public system operators at the national and regional levels; and move towards an economy-wide carbon price. These have met resistance from vested interests, in defence of the economic rents that have accumulated from the dense web of interventions that have accumulated. The paper shows that the first two of these reforms are nevertheless inevitable with active demand, storage, and decentralized generation technologies inverting the old assumptions of passive demand, no storage, and ever larger-scale generation that have underpinned the electricity industry for the past century. Delay in implementation means continued excess costs of energy and delays innovation.

Keywords: electricity markets; climate change; fossil fuels; intermittency; capacity markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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