Empirical Evidence for Inefficiencies in European Electricity Markets: Market Power and Barriers to Cross-Border Trade?

This dissertation applies a variety of quantitative methods to European electricity market data to enable us to detect, understand, and eventually mitigate market imperfections. The empirical data indicate that market power and barriers to cross-border trade partially explain today’s market failures. Briefly, the five key findings of this dissertation are: First, we observe a decoupling between German electricity prices and fuel cost, even though British electricity prices are largely explained by short-run cost factors. Second, we demonstrate that rising prices of European Union emission allowances (EUA) have a greater impact on German wholesale electricity prices than falling EUA prices. Third, we reject the assumption of full integration of European wholesale electricity markets in 2002-2006; for several pairs of countries, the weaker hypothesis of (bilateral) convergence is accepted (i.e. efforts to develop a single European market for electricity have been only partially successful). Fourth, we observe that daily auction prices of scarce cross-border transmission capacities are insufficient to explain the persistence of international price differentials. Empirically, our findings confirm the insufficiency of explicit capacity auctions as stated in the theoretical literature. Fifth, we identify inefficiencies in the market behavior for the interconnector linking France and the United Kingdom (UK), for which several explanations, including market power, may be plausible