Merchant Storage Investment in a Restructured Electricity Industry

Afzal S. Siddiqui, Ramteen Sioshansi and Antonio J. Conejo

The Energy Journal, 2019, vol. 40, issue 4, 129-164

Abstract: Restructuring and liberalisation of the electricity industry creates opportunities for investment in energy storage, which could be undertaken by a profit-maximising merchant storage operator. Because such a firm is concerned solely with maximising its own profit, the resulting storage-investment decision may be socially suboptimal (or detrimental). This paper develops a bi-level model of an imperfectly competitive electricity market. The modelling framework assumes electricity-generation and storage-operations decisions at the lower level and storage investment at the upper level. Our analytical results demonstrate that a relatively high (low) amount of market power in the generation sector leads to low (high) storage-capacity investment by the profit-maximising storage operator relative to a welfare maximiser. This can result in net social welfare losses with a profit-maximising storage operator compared to a no-storage case. Moreover, there are guaranteed to be net social welfare losses with a profit-maximising storage operator if the generation sector is sufficiently competitive. Using a charge on generation ramping between off- and on-peak periods, we induce the profit-maximising storage operator to invest in the same level of storage capacity as the welfare-maximising firm. Such a ramping charge can increase social welfare above the levels that are attained with a welfare-maximising storage operator.

Keywords: Energy storage; Bi-level modelling; Market power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5547/01956574.40.4.asid (text/html)

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:sae:enejou:v:40:y:2019:i:4:p:129-164

DOI: 10.5547/01956574.40.4.asid

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().