EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The long-run equilibrium impact of intermittent renewables on wholesale electricity prices

David M Newbery

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

Abstract: High levels of low variable cost intermittent renewables lower wholesale electricity prices, and the depression of these prices could legitimately be recovered from consumers, preferably through capacity payments. Given that renewables are frequently subsidized for their learning benefits and carbon reduction, this paper asks what part of these subsidies should be recovered from final consumers. In long-run equilibrium, renewables have no impact on the number of hours peaking capacity runs, and its impact is to displace largely baseload capacity. The fall in competitive prices is considerably less than the fall in fossil operating costs and provides a case for only a modest share of total subsidies to be charged to electricity consumers. The paper quantifies the amount that can legitimately be charged.

Keywords: renewables; electricity prices; subsidies; investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D47 H23 L94 Q42 Q48 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-01-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-reg
Note: dmgn
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe1601.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: The long-Run Equilibrium Impact of Intermittent Renewables on Wholesale Electricity Prices (2016) Downloads
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:1601

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-03
Handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:1601