The impact of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme on electricity generation sectors

The authors would like to thank Katheline Schubert and participants of the meeting Environmental economics" held in Lille on February 10th, 2009 for their helpful discussions and comments. This paper will be presented at the 2009 International Energy Workshop meeting (Venice, June 17th - 19th).In order to comply with their commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, France and Germany participate to the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) which concerns predominantly electricity generation sectors. In this paper we seek to know if the EU ETS gives appropriate economic incentives for an e¢ cient and strong system in line with Kyoto commitments. Because if so electricity producers in these countries should include the price of carbon in their costs functions. After identifying the di¤erent sub periods of the EU ETS during its pilot phase (2005-2007), we model the prices of various electricity contracts and look at their volatilities around their fundamentals while evaluating the correlation between the electricity prices in the two countries. We finnd that electricity producers in both countries were constrained to include the carbon price in their cost functions during the rst two years of operation of the EU ETS. During this period, German electricity producers were more constrained than their French counterparts and the inclusion of the carbon price in the cost function of electricity generation has been so much more stable in Germany than in France. Furthermore, the European market for emission allowances has increased the market power of the historical French electricity producer and has greatly contributed to the partial alignment of the wholesale price of electricity in France with those of Germany.