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Electricity needs to be consumed at the very moment of production, leading wholesale prices to fluctuate widely at (sub-)hourly time scales. This article investigates the response of aggregate electricity demand to such price variations. Using wind energy as an instrument, we estimate a significant and robust short-term price elasticity of about −0.05 in Germany and attribute this to industrial consumers. As the share of consumption that is exposed to real-time prices (currently less than 25%) expands, we expect the aggregated price elasticity to grow.
The average revenue, or market value, of wind and solar energy tends to fall with increasing market shares, as is now evident across European electricity markets. At the same time, these markets have become more interconnected. In this paper, we empirically study the multiple cross-border effects on the value of renewable energy: on one hand, interconnection is a flexibility resource that allows to export energy when it is locally abundant, benefitting renewables. On the other hand, wind and solar radiation are correlated across space, so neighboring supply adds to the local one to depress domestic prices. We estimate both effects, using spatial panel regression on electricity market data from 2015 to 2023 from 30 European bidding zones. We find that domestic wind and solar value is not only depressed by domestic, but also by neighboring renewables expansion. The better interconnected a market is, the smaller the effect of domestic but the larger the effect of neighboring renewables. While wind value is stabilized by interconnection, solar value is not. If wind market share increases both at home and in neighboring markets by one percentage point, the value factor of wind energy is reduced by just above 1 percentage points. For solar, this number is almost 4 percentage points.
Contracts for differences are widely seen as a cornerstone of Europe's future electricity market design. This paper is about designing such contracts. We identify the dispatch and investment distortions that conventional CfDs cause, the patches used to overcome these shortcomings, and the problems these fixes introduce. We then propose an alternative contract we call “financial” CfD. This hybrid between conventional CfDs and forward contracts mitigates revenue risk to a substantial degree while providing undistorted incentives. Like conventional CfDs, it is long-term and tailored to technology-specific (wind, solar, nuclear) generation patterns but, like forwards, decouples payments from actual generation. The proposed contract mitigates volume risk and avoids margin calls by accepting physical assets as collateral.
Eine Teilung des deutschen Marktgebietes würde die Marktwerte erneuerbarer Energien beeinflussen. Wind und Photovoltaik (PV) im Süden Deutschlands würden an Wert gewinnen, während Erneuerbare im Norden Erlöse einbüßen würden. Bei einer auch zukünftig stärkeren Konzentration von erneuerbaren Energien im Norden bedeutet dies insgesamt einen höheren Förderbedarf für PV – Wind wäre trotz niedriger Marktwerte in den meisten Regionen wirtschaftlich. Wenn eine regionale Steuerung erreicht werden soll, müsste die auszuzahlende Förderung für neue PV-Anlagen anhand des zonenübergreifenden Referenzmarktwertes berechnet werden. Durchschnittliche Börsenstrompreise würden durch eine Gebotszonenteilung im Süden Deutschlands leicht angehoben und im Norden gesenkt, die Effekte auf Endkundenpreise und damit verbundene Anreize zur Standortwahl von Industrieunternehmen sind allerdings als gering einzuschätzen.
Russia curbed its natural gas supply to Europe in 2021 and 2022, creating a grave energy crisis. This paper empirically estimates the crisis response of natural gas consumers in Germany—for decades the largest export market for Russian gas. Using a multiple regression model, we estimate the response of small consumers, industry, and power stations separately, controlling for the non-linear temperature-heating relationship, seasonality, and trends. We find significant and substantial gas savings for all consumer groups, but with differences in timing and size. For instance, industry started reducing consumption as early as September 2021, while small consumers saved substantially only since March 2022. Across all sectors, gas consumption during the second half of 2022 was 23% below the temperature-adjusted baseline. We discuss the drivers behind these savings and draw conclusions on their role in coping with the crisis.
Numerical optimization models are used to develop scenarios of the future energy system. Usually, they optimize the energy mix subject to engineering costs such as equipment and fuel. For onshore wind energy, some of these models use cost-potential curves that indicate how much electricity can be generated at what cost. These curves are upward sloping mainly because windy sites are occupied first and further expanding wind energy means deploying less favorable resources. Meanwhile, real-world wind energy expansion is curbed by local resistance, regulatory constraints, and legal challenges. This presumably reflects the perceived adverse effect that onshore wind energy has on the local human population, as well as other negative external effects. These disamenity costs are at the core of this paper. We provide a comprehensive and consistent set of cost-potential curves of wind energy for all European countries that include disamenity costs, and which can be used in energy system modeling. We combine existing valuation of disamenity costs from the literature that describe the costs as a function of the distance between turbine and households with gridded population data, granular geospatial data of wind speeds, and additional land-use constraints to calculate such curves. We find that disamenity costs are not a game changer: for most countries and assumptions, the marginal levelized cost of onshore wind energy increase by 0.2–12.5 €/MWh.
Europe is in the midst of the most severe energy crisis in a generation, at the core of which is the continuously plummeting supply of Russian natural gas. With alternative supply options being limited, natural gas prices have surged. This paper empirically estimates the response of natural gas demand to the price increase, using data from Germany—the so far largest consumer of Russian natural gas. We identify the crisis response of small and large consumers separately, controlling for temperature, gas-fired power generation, and economic activity. For small consumers, including mostly households, we find a substantial demand reduction of 6% from March onwards—most likely due to political and ethical considerations after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For industrial consumers, demand reductions started much earlier in August 2021, when wholesale prices for natural gas started to surge, with an average reduction of 11%. We conclude that voluntary industrial demand response has played a significant role in coping with the energy crisis so far.
Since September 2021, European natural gas prices are at record-high levels. On average, they have been six to seven times higher than pre-pandemic price levels. While the post-pandemic recovery of global natural gas demand has driven up prices around the world, the most important drivers for European gas prices were Russia's less-than-usual supply since mid-2021 and its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Western efforts to abandon Russian gas imports altogether mean that high natural gas prices are likely to stay for longer. While high gas prices may be the new normal, there is uncertainty about the economic reaction to this shock. How do energy-intensive industries react? Do global value chains collapse if intermediate goods produced in Europe become uneconomic because of high energy prices? Our preliminary analysis shows that industry response to has in fact been visible from the very onset of the energy crisis. A closer look at German fertilizer production, which heavily relies on natural gas as fuel and feedstock to produce ammonia as an intermediate product, reveals that increased ammonia imports have allowed domestic fertilizer production to remain remarkably stable.
Electricity is a peculiar economic good, the most important reason being that it needs to be supplied at the very moment of consumption. As a result, wholesale electricity prices fluctuate widely at hourly or sub-hourly time scales, regularly reaching multiples of their average, and even turn negative. This paper examines whether the demand for electricity responds to such price variations in the very short term. To solve the classical identification problem when estimating a demand curve, we use weather-driven wind energy generation as an instrument. Our robustness checks confirm that wind energy is indeed a strong and valid instrument. Using data from Germany, we estimate that a 1 €/MWh increase in the wholesale electricity price causes the aggregate electricity demand to decline by 67–80 MW or 0.12–0.14%, contradicting the conventional wisdom that electricity demand is highly price-inelastic. These estimates are statistically significant and robust across model specifications, estimators, and sensitivity analyses. At average price and demand, our estimates correspond to a price elasticity of demand of about –0.05. Comparing situations with high and low wind energy (5–95th percentile), we estimate that prices vary by 26 €/MWh, and the corresponding demand response to wholesale electricity prices is about 2 GW, or 2.6% of peak load. Our analysis suggests that the demand response in Germany can be attributed primarily to industrial consumers.
Despite the importance of evaluating all mitigation options to inform policy decisions addressing climate change, a comprehensive analysis of household-scale interventions and their emissions reduction potential is missing. Here, we address this gap for interventions aimed at changing individual households’ use of existing equipment, such as monetary incentives or feedback. We have performed a machine learning-assisted systematic review and meta-analysis to comparatively assess the effectiveness of these interventions in reducing energy demand in residential buildings. We extracted 360 individual effect sizes from 122 studies representing trials in 25 countries. Our meta-regression confirms that both monetary and non-monetary interventions reduce the energy consumption of households, but monetary incentives, of the sizes reported in the literature, tend to show on average a more pronounced effect. Deploying the right combinations of interventions increases the overall effectiveness. We have estimated a global carbon emissions reduction potential of 0.35 GtCO2 yr−1, although deploying the most effective packages of interventions could result in greater reduction. While modest, this potential should be viewed in conjunction with the need for de-risking mitigation pathways with energy-demand reductions.