Retail consumers and risk in centralized energy auctions for indexed long-term contracts in Chile

Lorenzo Reus, Francisco D. Munoz and Rodrigo Moreno

Energy Policy, 2018, vol. 114, issue C, 566-577

Abstract: Centralized energy auctions for long-term contracts are commonly-used mechanisms to ensure supply adequacy, to promote competition, and to protect retail customers from price spikes in Latin America. In Chile, the law mandates that all distribution companies must hold long-term contracts—which are awarded on a competitive centralized auction—to cover 100% of the projected demand from three to fifteen years into the future. These contracts can be indexed to a series of financial parameters, including fossil fuel prices at reference locations. Drawing from portfolio theory, we use a simple example to illustrate the difficulties of selecting, through the current clearing mechanism that focuses on average costs and individual characteristics of the offers, a portfolio of long-term energy contracts that could simultaneously minimize the expected future cost of energy and limit the risk exposure of retail customers. In particular, we show that if the objective of the regulator is to limit the risk to regulated consumers, it could be optimal to include contracts that would not be selected based on individual characteristics of the offers and a least-cost auction objective, but that could significantly reduce the price variance of the overall portfolio due to diversification effects between indexing parameters.

Keywords: Price risk; Energy auctions; Portfolio optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517308522
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:enepol:v:114:y:2018:i:c:p:566-577

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2017.12.028

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().