February 2022

Worldwide, the energy transition is underway. Whereas there is consensus regarding the need to reduce carbon emissions, promote renewables, and improve energy efficiency, there is still controversy regarding the optimal choice of policies to achieve those goals.

Policies differ in their efficiency impacts (i.e., whether they induce higher or lower costs), but also on their distributional implications (i.e., whether they create winners and losers). Furthermore, agents’ behavioral biases might impact the success or failure of the chosen policies.

With this triple focus on efficiency, equity and behavioral considerations, the Intensive Course on The Energy Transition: Economics and Policy, which will take place at the Barcelona GSE on May 19-20 2022, will provide participants (whether economists, engineers, or lawyers, working for firms or in regulatory agencies) with a thorough understanding of the most recent economic insights to analyze the performance of current and potential energy and climate policies. The course will mainly review policies affecting the transportation and power sectors, as well as the competition policy issues that are likely to arise during the energy transition. The program’s faculty includes leading international scholars and practitioners with extensive experience of the application of economic techniques to designing and assessing the performance of energy and climate policies. The Directors of the course are Massimo Motta (BGSE) and Natalia Fabra, head of EnergyEcoLab. Instructors are Natalia Fabra, Albert Banal-Estañol, Mar Reguant, and Lluís Saurí.

More information at
https://www.barcelonagse.eu/study/professional-courses/energy-economics

EnergyEcoLab will host a two-days workshop on energy economics on March 23 and 24,  at Puerta de Toledo Campus (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid).

We will have presentations and discussions about electricity markets and regulations on transport with a mix of applied theory and empirical papers.

We are pleased to report that our team’s work on energy storage is forthcoming in two recent publications at the Rand Journal of Economics and The Energy Journal.
The development and integration of large-scale energy storage facilities is a key factor for the expansion of renewable energy in the portfolio mix of the electricity generation. Our research will contribute to a better understanding on the effect of energy storage on market outcomes as well as on the incentives of storage owners to invest and operate storage facilities.

In “Storing Power: Market Structure Matters”, forthcoming at the Rand Journal of Economics, David Andrés-Cerezo and Natalia Fabra assess firms’ incentives to operate and invest in electricity storage facilities under different market structures, including competitive and strategic storage owners in the cases in which the storage owner is integrated with a dominant electricity producer or it is a stand-alone firm. Their results are key to understanding how to regulate electricity storage, an issue which is critical for the deployment of renewables in electricity markets.

Paper available here.

In “Large-scale Battery Storage, Short-term Market Outcomes, and Arbitrage” published at Energy Economics, Stefan Lamp and Mario Samano document document charging and discharging patterns in the Californian electricity market and show how the utility-scale batteries’ activity correlates with load and real-time prices during 2018 and 2019. The empirical findings are partially consistent with the optimal solution of an arbitrage maximizer, indicating that battery owners respond to price incentives only at certain hours of the day. In addition, they provide evidence that battery deployment in the years 2013 through 2017 lowered average intra-day wholesale price spreads and that current market conditions limit the profitability of batteries in this market.

Paper available here.