Secular Trends, Environmental Regulation, and Electricity Markets

Dallas Burtraw, Karen Palmer, Anthony Paul () and Matt Woerman
Additional contact information
Anthony Paul: Resources for the Future

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: The confluence of several pending environmental rulemakings will require billions of dollars of investment across the industry and changes in the operation of facilities. These changes may lead to retirement of some facilities, and there has been much debate about their potential effects on electricity reliability. Only very exceptional circumstances would trigger supply disruptions; however, the changes may affect electricity prices, the generation mix, and industry revenues. Coincident with these new rules, expectations about natural gas prices and future electricity demand growth are changing in ways that also will have substantial effects on the industry. This paper addresses these two sets of issues using a detailed simulation model of the U.S. electricity market. The findings suggest that recent downward adjustments in natural gas prices and electricty demand projections have a substantially larger impact on electricity prices and generation mix than do the new environmental rules.

Keywords: air pollution; electricity; regulation; equilibrium model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q41 Q52 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-03-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-12-15.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-12-15.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-12-15.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:rff:dpaper:dp-12-15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Resources for the Future ().