Efficient diffusion of renewable energies: A roller-coaster ride

Carsten Helm and Mathias Mier

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: When the supply of intermittent renewable energies like wind and solar is high, the electricity price is low. Conversely, prices are high when their supply is low. This reduces the profit potential in renewable energies and, therefore, incentives to invest in renewable capacities. Nevertheless, we show that perfect competition and dynamic pricing lead to efficient choices of renewable and fossil capacities, provided that external costs of fossils are internalized by an appropriate tax. We also investigate some properties of electricity markets with intermittent renewables and examine the market diffusion of renewables as their capacity costs fall. We show that the intermittency of renewables causes an S-shaped diffusion pattern, implying that a rapid build-up of capacities is followed by a stage of substantially slowerdevelopment. While this pattern is well known from the innovation literature, the mechanism is new. We also find that technology improvements such as better battery storage capacities have substantial effects not only on the speed of market penetration, but also on its pattern. Finally, fluctuations of energy prices rise with the share of renewables. If regulators respond with a price cap, this leads to a faster market diffusion of renewables.

JEL-codes: D24 Q21 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-ino and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145893/1/VfS_2016_pid_7014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Efficient diffusion of renewable energies: A roller-coaster ride (2016)
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:zbw:vfsc16:145893

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().