IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cam/camdae/0469.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Electricity Liberalisation in Britain: the quest for a satisfactory wholesale market design

Author

Listed:
  • Newbery, D.

Abstract

Britain was the exemplar of electricity market reform, demonstrating the importance of ownership unbundling and workable competition in generation and supply. Privatisation created de facto duopolies that supported increasing price-cost margins and induced excessive (English) entry. Concentration was ended by trading horizontal for vertical integration in subsequent mergers. Competition arrived just as the Pool was replaced by New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA) intended to address its claimed shortcomings. NETA cost over £700 million, and had ambiguous market impacts. Prices fell dramatically as a result of (pre-NETA) competition, generating companies withdrew plant, causing fears about security of supply and a subsequent widening of price-cost margins.

Suggested Citation

  • Newbery, D., 2004. "Electricity Liberalisation in Britain: the quest for a satisfactory wholesale market design," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0469, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    • Handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:0469
    Note: CMI, IO
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/electricity/publications/wp/ep64.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Roger E. Bohn & Michael C. Caramanis & Fred C. Schweppe, 1984. "Optimal Pricing in Electrical Networks over Space and Time," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 15(3), pages 360-376, Autumn.
    2. Newbery, D.M. & Pollitt, M.G., 1996. "The Restructuring and Privatisation of the CEGB: Was It Worth It?," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 9607, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Pollitt, M. & Dale, L., 2018. "Restructuring the Chinese Electricity Supply Sector - How industrial electricity prices are determined in a liberalized power market: lessons from Great Britain," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1871, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    2. Moore, J. & Woo, C.K. & Horii, B. & Price, S. & Olson, A., 2010. "Estimating the option value of a non-firm electricity tariff," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1609-1614.
    3. Vadim Borokhov, 2014. "On the properties of nodal price response matrix in electricity markets," Papers 1404.3678, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2015.
    4. Karsten Neuhoff, 2002. "Optimal congestion treatment for bilateral electricity trading," Working Papers EP05, Energy Policy Research Group, Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.
    5. Grimm, Veronika & Schewe, Lars & Schmidt, Martin & Zöttl, Gregor, 2017. "Uniqueness of market equilibrium on a network: A peak-load pricing approach," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 261(3), pages 971-983.
    6. James B. Bushnell & Catherine Wolfram, 2009. "The Guy at the Controls: Labor Quality and Power Plant Efficiency," NBER Chapters, in: International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms, pages 79-102, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Brunekreeft, Gert, 2004. "Market-based investment in electricity transmission networks: controllable flow," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 269-281, December.
    8. Makoto TANAKA, 2005. "Optimal Transmission Capacity under Nodal Pricing and Incentive Regulation for Transco," Discussion papers 05021, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    9. Daniel Adelman & Canan Uçkun, 2019. "Dynamic Electricity Pricing to Smart Homes," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 67(6), pages 1520-1542, November.
    10. Brown, D.P. & Tsai, C.H. & Woo, C.K. & Zarnikau, J. & Zhu, S., 2020. "Residential electricity pricing in Texas's competitive retail market," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    11. Woo, C.K. & Chen, Y. & Olson, A. & Moore, J. & Schlag, N. & Ong, A. & Ho, T., 2017. "Electricity price behavior and carbon trading: New evidence from California," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 204(C), pages 531-543.
    12. Hauteclocque, Adrien de & Glachant, Jean-Michel, 2009. "Long-term energy supply contracts in European competition policy: Fuzzy not crazy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(12), pages 5399-5407, December.
    13. Guo, Bowei & Weeks, Melvyn, 2022. "Dynamic tariffs, demand response, and regulation in retail electricity markets," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    14. John Kwoka & Michael Pollitt & Sanem Sergici, 2010. "Divestiture policy and operating efficiency in U.S. electric power distribution," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 38(1), pages 86-109, August.
    15. Ishizaki, Takayuki & Koike, Masakazu & Yamaguchi, Nobuyuki & Ueda, Yuzuru & Imura, Jun-ichi, 2020. "Day-ahead energy market as adjustable robust optimization: Spatio-temporal pricing of dispatchable generators, storage batteries, and uncertain renewable resources," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    16. Bruno Canizes & João Soares & Angelo Costa & Tiago Pinto & Fernando Lezama & Paulo Novais & Zita Vale, 2019. "Electric Vehicles’ User Charging Behaviour Simulator for a Smart City," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(8), pages 1-20, April.
    17. Michael Hellwig & Dominik Schober & Luis Cabral, 2018. "Incentive Regulation: Evidence From German Electricity Networks," Working Papers 18-03, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    18. Mariola Ndrio & Anna Winnicki & Subhonmesh Bose, 2019. "Pricing Economic Dispatch with AC Power Flow via Local Multipliers and Conic Relaxation," Papers 1910.10673, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    19. Ländner, Eva-Maria & Märtz, Alexandra & Schöpf, Michael & Weibelzahl, Martin, 2019. "From energy legislation to investment determination: Shaping future electricity markets with different flexibility options," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 1100-1110.
    20. Vadim Borokhov, 2022. "Utilizing the redundant constraints for the uplift payment elimination," Operational Research, Springer, vol. 22(2), pages 1377-1402, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    electricity; liberalisation; market design; market power;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L94 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Electric Utilities
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:0469. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jake Dyer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.