causalities between co2 electricity and other energy variables during phase i and phase ii of the eu ets the topic of this article is the analysis of the interplay between daily carbon electricity and gas price data with the european union emission trading system eu ets for co2 emissions in a first step we have performed granger causality tests for phase i of the eu ets january 2005 until december 2007 and the first year of phase ii of the eu ets 2008 the analysis includes both spot and forward markets given the close interactions between the two sets of markets the results show that during phase i coal and gas prices through the clean dark and spark spread impacted co2 futures prices which in return granger caused electricity prices during the first year of the phase ii the short run rent capture theory in which electricity prices granger cause co2 prices prevailed on the basis of the qualitative results of the granger causality tests we obtained the formulation testable equations for quantitative analysis standard ols regressions yielded statistically robust and theoretically coherent results

addressing leakage in the eu ets border adjustment or output based allocation the eu ets has been criticised for threatening the competitiveness of european industry and generating carbon leakage i e increasing foreign greenhouse gas emissions two main options have been put forward to tackle these concerns border adjustments and output based allocation i e allocation of free allowances in proportion to current production we compare various configurations of these two options as well as a scenario with full auctioning and no border adjustment against this background we develop a model of the main sectors covered by the eu ets electricity steel cement and aluminium we conclude that the most efficient way to tackle leakage is auctioning with border adjustment which generally induces a negative leakage a spillover this holds even if the border adjustment does not include indirect emissions if it is based on eu rather than foreign specific emissions or for some values of the parameters if it covers only imports another relatively efficient policy is to combine auctioning in the electricity sector and output based allocation in exposed industries especially if free allowances are given both for direct and indirect emissions i e those generated by the generation of the electricity consumed although output based allocation is generally less effective than border adjustment to tackle leakage it is more effective to mitigate production losses in the sectors affected by the ets which may ease climate policy adoption c 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

allowance trading and energy consumption under a personal carbon trading scheme a dynamic programming approach abstract in response to the challenge of climate change personal carbon trading was put forward as a policy instrument to promote low carbon behavior in the household sector to evaluate the effectiveness of this scheme it is important to gain insight into the allowance trading and energy consumption behavior in a long emission commitment period this paper proposes a dynamic programming model to investigate allowance trading and energy consumption a main feature of the model is its consideration of allowance banking and borrowing activities ten simulated scenarios with different allowance prices price volatility and carbon emission rates are discussed the findings show that consumers would trade more actively when allowance price is volatile it is also found that energy consumption and allowance trading will decrease when the carbon emission rate increases overall the analysis in this paper implies that personal carbon trading scheme would be an effective policy measure to change consumers behavior therefore it would be valuable for decision makers to consider the introduction and implementation of this scheme

price formation in electricity forward markets and the relevance of systematic forecast errors since the liberalisation of the european electricity sector forward and futures contracts have gained significant interest of market participants due to risk management reasons for pricing of these contracts an important fact concerns the non storability of electricity in this case according to economic theory forward prices are related to the expected spot prices which are built on fundamental market expectations in the following article the crucial impact parameters of forward electricity prices and the relationship between forward and future spot prices will be assessed by an empirical analysis of electricity prices at the european energy exchange and the nord pool power exchange in fact price formation in the considered markets is influenced by historic spot market prices yielding a biased forecasting power of long term contracts although market and risk assessment measures of market participants and supply and demand shocks can partly explain the futures spot bias inefficiencies in the analysed forward markets cannot be ruled out

role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in price correlations and volatilities between carbon markets the present paper theoretically and empirically examines the role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in volatilities and price correlations between the eu and kyoto protocol emissions trading schemes a supply and demand based correlation model between eua and scer price returns is proposed in detail using inverse box cox type marginal abatement cost mac curves and simple emission reduction volume processes the model includes financial players eua scer swap transaction in boom periods of carbon prices using the logit model for eua and eua scer swap volume correlations and stronger energy price impacts on eua prices than scer prices using a mean reverting lognormal process for energy prices the empirical studies using eua and scer prices estimate the model parameters resulting in a positive eua volume impact on eua scer swap transactions and a positive energy price impact on eua prices it is shown that high eua scer price correlations during high eua price periods stemmed from eua scer swap transactions whereas high eua scer price correlations during the period of financial turmoil with low eua prices came from the drop in energy prices we also show that the leverage effects often observed in security markets exist in both the eua and scer markets according to the price volatility relation

carbon pass through in the electricity sector an econometric analysis abstract we conduct an econometric analysis to investigate the carbon pass through in the greek electricity sector for this reason we utilize a rich micro level panel dataset including hourly data for 24 thermal power plants spanning the period from january 2014 to december 2017 in order to study the pass through of emissions costs to wholesale electricity prices we employ an instrumental variable approach our findings survived several robustness checks accounting for logged linear and non linear econometric specifications the empirical results indicate the existence of an almost complete pass through revealing that retailers fully internalize the cost of co2 permits this study incurs important policy implications since the complete pass through signify that wholesale electricity prices will increase at least in the short run however the overall effect on retail prices will be mostly affected by the amount of co2 permits and the fuel energy mix

allowance price and distributional effects under a personal carbon trading scheme abstract personal carbon trading pct is a downstream cap and trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions from the household sector in comparison to an upstream carbon trading scheme pct is a progressive scheme in which the poorer consumers are mostly winners as their levels of emissions are generally lower this paper investigates the equilibrium price for allowances and distributional effects under a pct scheme first we propose an equilibrium model for pct from which we derive an equilibrium price for allowances second a consumer surplus analysis is conducted to examine the welfare changes caused by the pct scheme generally we find that the pct scheme is progressive and can provide a buffer between the energy and allowance price based on these results the implications are discussed and suggestions for a future study are provided

a derivation of the marginal abatement cost curve abstract the relationship between a firm s technology and its marginal abatement cost mac curve is explored even under the simplest specifications the mac curve will be kinked at some point except under a special assumption which in reality could easily be violated the nondifferentiability implies that the choice of instrument under uncertainty may depend on the targeted level of emissions reduction also stability conditions for dynamic tax mechanisms may be violated in the neighborhood of the kink point a policy implication is that in some cases output restrictions are as efficient as emissions restrictions in contrast to previous results

stability of us petroleum refinery response to relative product prices abstract the stability of the response of petrol s share of petroleum product mix to changes in petroleum product prices is investigated in this paper by using the cooley and prescott varying parameter technique on us data a significant response to changes in product prices is found when the price of petrol increased by 1 its share of product mix increased by over 0 08 while increases in residual and distillate fuel oil prices decreased petrol s share this response was found to be stable from 1936 to 1976 with the war years excluded thus the usa with ample cracking and downstream conversion capacity has been able to respond consistently to the variations in product prices although the model proved stable less precise and less elastic estimates when the period 1974 76 was included suggest less consistent responses under conditions of large price changes heavier crude oils increased unleaded petrol production and crude oil shortages

fitting semiparametric markov regime switching models to electricity spot prices abstract recently regime switching models have become the standard tool for modeling electricity prices these models capture the main properties of electricity spot prices well but estimation of the model parameters requires computer intensive methods moreover the distribution of the price spikes must be fully specified although the high volatility of the spikes makes it difficult to check such distributional assumptions consequently there are a number of competing proposals for the distribution in the spike regime as an alternative we propose a semiparametric markov regime switching model that leaves the distribution under the spike regime unspecified we show that the model parameters can be estimated by employing robust statistical techniques this presents an alternative to the existing estimation methods that are based on computer intensive numerical maximization of the likelihood function the model in combination with the estimation framework is easier to estimate needs less computation time and distributional assumptions to show its advantages we compare the proposed model with a well established markov regime switching model in a simulation study furthermore we apply the model to log prices for the australian electricity market the results are in accordance with the results from the simulation study indicating that the proposed model might be advantageous whenever the distribution of the spike process is not sufficiently known the results are thus encouraging and suggest the use of our approach when modeling electricity prices and pricing derivatives

robust estimation and forecasting of the long term seasonal component of electricity spot prices when building stochastic models for electricity spot prices the problem of uttermost importance is the estimation and consequent forecasting of a component to deal with trends and seasonality in the data while the short term seasonal components daily weekly are more regular and less important for valuation of typical power derivatives the l ong term seasonal components ltsc seasonal annual are much more diffi cult to tackle surprisingly in many academic papers dealing with electricity spot price modeling the importance of the seasonal decomposition is neglected and the problem of forecasting it is not considered with this paper we want to fill the gap and present a thorough study on estimation and forecasting of the ltsc of electricity spot prices we consider a battery of models based on fourier or wavelet decomposition combined with linear or exponential decay we find that all considered wavelet base d models are significantly better in terms of forecasting spot prices up to a year ahead than all considered sine based models this result questions the validity and usefulness of stochastic models of spot electricity prices built on sinusoidal long term seasonal components

econometric analysis of australian emissions markets and electricity prices emissions trading schemes aim to reduce the emissions in certain pollutants using a market based scheme where participants can buy and sell permits for these emissions this paper analyses the efficiency of the two largest schemes in australia the nsw greenhouse gas abatement scheme and the mandatory renewable energy trading scheme through their effect on the electricity prices from 2004 to 2010 we use a long run structural modelling technique for the first time on this market it provides a practical long run approach to structural relationships which enable the determination of the effectiveness of the theoretical expectations of these schemes the generalised forecast error variance decomposition analysis finds that both schemes emissions prices have little effect on electricity prices generalised impulse response function analysis support this finding indicating that when shocks are applied to electricity by the two schemes it returns to equilibrium very quickly this indicates that these schemes are not having the effect anticipated in their legislation

windfall profits in the power sector during phase iii of the eu ets interplay and effects of renewables and carbon prices abstract since power utilities were originally grandfathered into the eu ets by way of a free allocation of carbon emission allowances eua the issue of windfall profits accruing to producers with carbon intensive generation portfolios has been the subject of critical analysis one of the chief aims of the switch to a predominantly auction based allocation system at the onset of phase iii of the eu ets was to negate the incidence of windfall profits the following analysis examines the merits of this policy aim drawing on economic theory of power markets a linear optimisation model covering the electricity market of the eu member states is deployed to investigate this question scenarios reflecting developments over a medium term horizon 10 years are developed with which carbon prices are endogenously determined their effects on the contribution margins of producers in the member states are subsequently evaluated the overall findings indicate that the incidence of windfall profits in the power sector remains prevalent in the overwhelming majority of eu countries the analysis suggests that the carbon intensiveness of the respective generation fleet is not the deciding factor as to whether producers earn windfall profits but rather the fundamental generation structure of the power plant fleet the results raise questions about the capacity of the current eu ets regime to provide the desired decarbonising effect on power producers generation portfolios in european power markets

carbon pricing and electricity markets the case of the australian clean energy bill abstract we examine the impact of the clean energy bill on the price behavior of electricity futures contracts in the australian national electricity market first we compute ex ante forward risk premiums in the pre tax period until june 2012 then derive market implied expectations about additional costs of the carbon pricing mechanism cpm on generators as well as pass through rates during the carbon tax july 2012 june 2014 and post tax after july 2014 periods our results suggest that the observed carbon premiums became increasingly higher once the carbon tax had been proposed and subsequently legislated in 2011 during periods where market participants could be relatively certain that the tax would be effective we find expected carbon pass through rates between 67 and 150 which seem to be inversely related to emission intensities in the regional markets our results are also a clear indication of strong policy uncertainty with regards to the cpm and suggest that in the future a stable and long term policy framework would be required for a carbon pricing mechanism to have its full effect

what drives volatility in natural gas prices abstract we examine the primary drivers of u s natural gas price volatility to do so we apply a structural heterogeneous autoregressive var shvar model accommodating structural breaks in both the coefficient and volatility to monthly time series data on natural gas supply demand and price between january 1978 and july 2018 we detect several structural changes in coefficients and shock volatility in the natural gas market our findings indicate that the response of natural gas prices differs significantly depending on the regime and type of shock in the natural gas market while demand shocks specific to the natural gas market are the primary drivers of natural gas price volatility structural supply shocks also play a significant role in explaining movements in natural gas prices our results suggest that failure to consider structural breaks in the coefficient and volatility may result in biased estimates and distorted impulse responses of the impact of shocks on natural gas price volatility

an analysis of australia s large scale renewable energy target restoring market confidence in 2001 australia introduced legislation requiring investment in new renewable electricity generating capacity the legislation was significantly expanded in 2009 to give effect to a 20 renewable energy target ret importantly the policy was introduced with bipartisan support and is consistent with global policy trends in this article we examine the history of the policy and establish that the stop start nature of renewable policy development has resulted in investors withholding new capital until greater certainty is provided we utilise the methodology from simshauser and nelson 2012 to examine whether capital market efficiency losses would occur under certain policy scenarios the results show that electricity costs would increase by between 51 million and 119 million if the large scale ret is abandoned even after accounting for avoided renewable costs our conclusions are clear we find that policymakers should be guided by a high level public policy principle in relation to large scale renewable energy policy constant review is not reform

marginal co2 cost pass through under imperfect competition in power markets abstract in line with economic theory carbon ets determines a rise in marginal cost equal to the carbon opportunity cost regardless of whether carbon allowances are allocated free of charge or not this paper aims at evaluating to what extent firms in imperfectly competitive markets will pass through into electricity prices the increase in cost by using the load duration curve approach and the dominant firm with competitive fringe model we show that the result is ambiguous the increase in price can be either lower or higher than the marginal co2 cost depending on several structural factors the degree of market concentration the available capacity whether there is excess capacity or not the power plant mix in the market and the power demand level peak vs off peak hours the empirical analysis of the italian context an emblematic case of imperfectly competitive market which can be split into four sub markets with different structural features provides a contribution supporting the model predictions market power therefore would determine a significant deviation from the full pass through rule but we cannot know the sign of this deviation a priori i e without before taking carefully into account the structural features of the power market

the sensitivity of consumption of oil products to price changes an econometric investigation abstract this paper presents a small econometric model of the supply and demand of motor spirit diesel fuel oil and other gas diesel oil by modelling at this level of disaggregation it is possible to identify the dynamic structure of each market and estimate own price and cross price elasticities

stability of canadian refinery response to petroleum product prices the proportion of gasoline in a barrel of crude oil varies in response to changes in relative product prices this response is found to be significant and stable using the cooley prescott varying parameter technique on canadian data for 1956 77 when the price of gasoline increases by 1 its share increases by 0 28 kerosene and gasoline are found to be substitutes in production while gasoline and residual fuel oil are found to be complements the us has a different response function with heavier rather than lighter products as substitutes for gasoline in the production process these variations are attributed to differences in energy product markets and government policies

does ecological economics have a future contradiction and reinvention in the age of climate change abstract this paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field s critical founding principles we first consider robert costanza s treatment of nicholas stern s global deal and then survey climate change related articles published in this journal over the past five years this survey reveals how mainstream neoclassical methodologies dominate discourse and do so by marginalizing more critical political economy analyses this situation imperils the field s founding vision of a no growth steady state it also fails to address the related growth dynamics of capitalism without such a critical treatment the field s formal embrace of methodological pluralism actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent this situation undermines the field s historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm ecological economics now faces a problematic future its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context without such a choice ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro growth imperatives

electricity futures prices indirect storability expectations and risk premiums the goal of this paper is to examine to what extent electricity futures prices contain expected risk premiums or have power to forecast spot prices and whether this might be dependent on the type of electricity supply we analyse futures prices from the dutch market a market in which power is produced with storable fossil fuels and futures prices from the nordpool market where electricity is mostly produced by hydropower we show that futures prices from markets in which electricity is predominantly produced by imperfectly storable fuels such as hydro wind and solar contain information about expected changes in the spot price of electricity whereas futures prices from markets in which electricity is predominantly produced with perfectly storable fuels contain information about both expected price changes and time varying risk premiums these findings provide insight in the applicability of forward price models one cannot apply the same model to all electricity markets forward models for markets with imperfect indirect storability should depend heavily on price expectations and models should include time varying risk premiums for markets with perfect indirect storability

the response of u s natural gas futures and spot prices to storage change surprises fundamental information and the effect of escalating physical gas production abstract we study the behavior of u s natural gas futures and spot prices on and around the weekly announcements by the u s energy information administration of the amount of natural gas in storage we identify an inverse empirical relation between changes in futures prices and surprises in the change in natural gas in storage and that this relation is not driven by the absolute size of the surprise the evidence also indicates prices react first in the futures market for natural gas with that information then flowing to the spot market post 2005 corresponding to a period of significant increases in the production of natural gas in the united states the response of prices to storage surprises was larger in absolute value no evidence is found of economically meaningful reactions to the surprise other than on the date the storage news is released the results demonstrate the importance of fundamental information in the formation of natural gas prices

spot and derivative pricing in the eex power market using spot and futures price data from the german eex power market we test the adequacy of various one factor and two factor models for electricity spot prices the models are compared along two different dimensions 1 we assess their ability to explain the major data characteristics and 2 the forecasting accuracy for expected future spot prices is analyzed we find that the regime switching models clearly outperform its competitors in almost all respects the best results are obtained using a two regime model with a gaussian distribution in the spike regime furthermore for short and medium term periods our results underpin the frequently stated hypothesis that electricity futures quotes are consistently greater than the expected future spot a situation which is denoted as contango

macro determinants of volatility and volatility spillover in energy markets abstract we analyze the time varying volatility and spillover effects in crude oil heating oil and natural gas futures markets by incorporating changes in important macroeconomic variables and major political and weather related events into the conditional variance equations we allow asymmetric responses to random disturbances in each market as well as to good and bad economic news related to the overall economy results show the presence of asymmetric effects in both random disturbances and macroeconomic variables a bidirectional volatility spillover effect is found between natural gas and crude oil and between the natural gas and heating oil markets crude oil volatility is found to increase following major political financial and natural events seasonality and day of the week effects are found in the crude oil and heating oil markets

price drivers and structural breaks in european carbon prices 2005 2007 this article aims at characterizing the daily price fundamentals of european union allowances euas traded since 2005 as part of the emissions trading scheme ets the presence of two structural changes on april 2006 following the disclosure of 2005 verified emissions and on october 2006 following the european commission announcement of stricter phase ii allocation allows to isolate distinct fundamentals evolving overtime the results extend previous literature by showing that eua spot prices react not only to energy prices with forecast errors but also to unanticipated temperatures changes during colder events besides the sub period decomposition of the pilot phase gives a better grasp of institutional and market events that drive allowance price changes

energy markets volatility modelling using garch abstract this paper investigates the empirical properties of oil natural gas and electricity price volatilities using a range of univariate and multivariate garch models and daily data from wholesale markets in the united states for the period from 2001 to 2013 the key contribution to the literature is the estimation of trivariate bekk and dcc models that allow us to observe spillovers and interactions among energy markets we evaluate and compare the performance of univariate and multivariate models with a range of diagnostic and forecast performance tests and assess forecasting performance and conditional correlation dynamics

carbon prices and ccs investment a comparative study between the european union and china abstract carbon capture and storage is considered as a key option for climate change mitigation policy makers and investors need to know when ccs becomes economically attractive integrating ccs in a power plant adds significant costs which can be offset by a sufficient co 2 price however most markets have failed currently the weak carbon price threatens ccs deployment in the european union eu in china a carbon regulation is appearing and ccs encounters a rising interest this study investigates two questions how much is the extra cost of a ccs plant in the eu in comparison with china second what is the co 2 price beyond which ccs plants become more profitable than reference plants in the eu and in china to address these issues i conducted a literature review on public studies about ccs costs to objectively assess the profitability of ccs plants i constructed a net present value model to calculate the levelised cost of electricity and the breakeven co 2 price ccs plants become the most profitable plant type beyond 115 tco 2 in the eu vs 45 tco 2 in china offshore transport and storage costs i advise on the optimal plant type choice depending on the co 2 price in both countries

consumer electricity and gas prices across australian capital cities structural breaks effects of policy reforms and interstate differences abstract we detect and analyze the most significant structural changes in the quarterly growth rate of consumer electricity and gas prices in australia and estimate their corresponding seasonal effects to do so we apply the general modelling framework of the bai perron breaking regression to all available quarterly data for capital cities individually and australia as a whole 1989q3 2017q2 retail energy prices in most australian states were deregulated in the 2000s we find that increases in average quarterly growth rates of electricity and gas prices consistently occurred in the third september quarter and find very few instances of increases in any other quarters of the year in the post deregulation period price increases are significantly higher than in the pre deregulation era results for some capital cities are stark in perth third quarter growth in electricity prices has been five times higher after the structural break in australia as a whole third quarter growth in gas prices has been three times higher after the structural break we discuss several possible explanations for energy price rises in the period since deregulation

an empirical comparison of alternate regime switching models for electricity spot prices one of the most profound features of electricity spot prices are the price spikes markov regime switching mrs models seem to be a natural candidate for modeling this spiky behavior however in the studies published so far the goodness of fit of the proposed models has not been a major focus while most of the models were elegant their fit to empirical data has either been not examined thoroughly or the signs of a bad fit ignored with this paper we want to fill the gap we calibrate and test a range of mrs models in an attempt to find parsimonious specifications that not only address the main characteristics of electricity prices but are statistically sound as well we find that the most universal and robust structure is that of an independent spike 3 regime model with heteroscedastic diffusion type base regime dynamics and shifted spike regime distributions

revisiting the relationship between spot and futures prices in the nord pool electricity market abstract this work discusses potential pitfalls of applying linear regression models for explaining the relationship between spot and futures prices in electricity markets in particular the bias coming from the simultaneity problem the effect of correlated measurement errors and the impact of seasonality on the regression results studying a 13 year long 1998 2010 price series of spot and futures prices at nord pool and employing regression models with garch residuals we show that the impact of the water reservoir level on the risk premium is positive which is to be expected but contradicts the results of botterud et al 2010 we also show that after taking into account the seasonality of the water level the storage cost theory proposed by botterud et al 2010 to explain the behavior of convenience yield has only limited support in the data

speculative carryover an empirical examination of the u s refined copper market this article develops and estimates an empirically tractable model of equilibrium storage the method bridges the gap between theoretical rational expectations models and applied commodity market work the application to the u s refined copper market provides estimates of structural supply and demand rational price forecasts and the risk of copper storage that is consistent with modern portfolio theory

a note on using the hodrick prescott filter in electricity markets abstract recently nowotarski et al 2013 have found that wavelet based models for the long term seasonal component ltsc are not only better in extracting the ltsc from a series of spot electricity prices but also significantly more accurate in terms of forecasting these prices up to a year ahead than the commonly used monthly dummies and sine based models however a clear disadvantage of the wavelet based approach is the increased complexity of the technique as compared to the other two classes of ltsc models and the resulting need for dedicated numerical software which may not be readily available to practitioners in their work environments to facilitate this problem we propose here a much simpler yet equally powerful method for identifying the ltsc in electricity spot price series it makes use of the hodrick prescott hp filter a widely recognized tool in macroeconomics

does emission permit allocation affect co2 cost pass through a theoretical analysis abstract carbon emissions trading may result in co 2 cost pass through and its rate is influenced by a number of factors this paper theoretically investigates how emission permit allocation affects co 2 cost pass through rate by developing a nash cournot oligopolistic market equilibrium model we find that the derived co 2 cost pass through rates are consistent when grandfathering and auctioning rules are used for permit allocation which are higher than that for benchmarking rule it has also been found that the magnitude of co 2 cost pass through rate is relevant to the type of definition product market structure and average carbon intensity of the industry we suggest that policy makers first use benchmarking rule to attract firms to participate at the early stage of emissions trading system ets and then take auctioning rule when ets is well developed

component estimation for electricity prices procedures and comparisons abstract electricity price time series usually exhibit some form of nonstationarity corresponding to long term behavior one or more periodic components as well as dependence on calendar effects as a result modeling electricity prices requires accounting for both long term and periodic components in the literature several filtering procedures have been proposed but a standard has not yet been found furthermore since different procedures are applied in contexts that are not homogeneous with respect to data periods and final goals a fair comparison is difficult this work considers several methods for component estimation in a homogeneous framework and compares them according to specific criteria the final purpose is to find an estimation procedure that performs well independently of the intended market and that can be proposed as a reference for electricity price time series filtering

dynamic multiscale interactions between european carbon and electricity markets during 2005 2016 this study explores the dynamic multiscale interactions between carbon and electricity markets during phases i 2005 2007 ii 2008 2012 and ongoing iii 2013 2016 by introducing the bivariate empirical mode decomposition bemd linear and nonlinear granger causality tests firstly bemd is used to decompose the european carbon and electricity prices into several pairs of simple modes with different timescales secondly causality tests are performed at each pair of modes with a similar timescale significant but asymmetric causalities can be found that the bidirectional linear causality turns to a unidirectional one running from the electricity price to the carbon price from phase i to phase iii whereas the nonlinear interaction enhances from insignificance to significance during the three phases the causality at short timescale is consistent with that of the original data while the causalities at mid and long timescales are more diversified the findings obtained show that the effect of carbon market on the electricity market is weakening which indicates that it is needed to increase its efficiency by raising the carbon price moreover a dynamic adjusting mechanism of emission allowances will be called for as well as the guidance aimed at different timescales in the future

effect of inventory announcements on crude oil price volatility abstract this paper examines the behavior of crude oil futures price volatility and investigates how the eia weekly crude oil inventory reports announcements especially information shocks impact crude oil price movement and volatility this study focuses on inventory information shocks using a new measure rather than on inventory changes themselves the empirical results reveal that inventory information shocks rather than actual inventory changes negatively affect crude oil returns on the day the eia releases the inventory information although inventory shocks have no effect on daily conditional variance which mainly follows a garch 1 1 process to test the robustness of our model we re estimate the models for three subsamples according to all results we find that the effect of inventory shocks is weakened in rapid growth periods and disappears in steep fall markets

allowance price drivers in the first phase of the eu ets abstract in the first phase of the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets the price per ton of co 2 initially rose to over 30 the price then collapsed to essentially zero by mid 2007 by deriving a structural model of the allowance price under the assumption of efficient markets i examine the extent to which this variation in price can be explained by marginal abatement costs i then gradually relax the model by allowing for delayed adjustment of price to fundamentals as well as by introducing lagged lhs variables the pattern of results suggests that while prices were not initially driven by marginal abatement costs this inefficiency was largely corrected after the accounting of 2005 emissions in april 2006

a literature review of economic studies on carbon pricing and australian wholesale electricity markets abstract with the ongoing development of australian anthropogenic climate change mitigation policies there has been a steady increase in modelling studies undertaken to estimate australian carbon prices and their impact on existing electricity markets this article summarises some of the more prominent studies completed by many of australia s foremost economic modelling firms we developed a simple approach for testing the consistency of these studies and their findings in relation to carbon pass through unfortunately we have established that the studies are entirely inconsistent in their estimation of carbon pass through furthermore we were unable to establish why the estimation of carbon pass through varies so significantly this has important implications for policy makers given much of the compensation to be paid to households and businesses under the clean energy future package is predicated on simple assumptions of carbon pass through based upon our analysis of these economic studies our conclusion is that australian policy makers are best guided by relying upon the numerous a posteriori estimations of pass through in the european union emissions trading scheme ets rather than australian a priori studies

modelling interregional links in electricity price spikes abnormally high price spikes in spot electricity markets represent a significant risk to market participants as such a literature has developed that focuses on forecasting the probability of such spike events moving beyond simply forecasting the level of price many univariate time series models have been proposed to dealwith spikes within an individual market region this paper is the first to develop a multivariate self exciting point process model for dealing with price spikes across connected regions in the australian national electricity market the importance of the physical infrastructure connecting the regions on the transmission of spikes is examined it is found that spikes are transmitted between the regions and the size of spikes is influenced by the available transmission capacity it is also found that improved risk estimates are obtained when inter regional linkages are taken into account

increasing carbon pricing in the eu evaluating the options abstract a streamlined model applied at the member state level is used to evaluate possibilities for greater reliance on carbon pricing to meet the european union s mitigation pledge for the paris agreement the economic welfare costs of currently envisioned policies including the emissions trading system ets requirements for energy efficiency vehicle emission rates and national targets for non ets emissions are estimated at 1 1 of eu gdp in 2030 or 167 per ton of carbon dioxide co2 reduced on net these policies lose a small amount of revenue 0 05 of eu gdp a series of reforms progressively extending emissions pricing across sectors and countries reduces costs by about 0 6 of 2030 eu gdp or 90 per ton of co2 reduced while increasing revenues by almost 1 of eu gdp higher emissions prices in the eu ets would create the largest welfare gain and no country is made worse off from this reform

the samuelson hypothesis in futures markets an analysis using intraday data this paper considers the samuelson hypothesis which argues that the futures price volatility increases as the futures contract approaches its expiration utilizing intraday data from 20 futures markets in six futures exchanges we find strong support for the samuelson hypothesis in agricultural futures however the samuelson hypothesis does not hold for other futures contracts we also provide supporting evidence that the negative covariance hypothesis is the key factor for the empirical support of the samuelson hypothesis in addition our findings remain largely unaltered even after we control for seasonality and liquidity effects

asymmetric impacts of fundamentals on the natural gas futures volatility an augmented garch approach we investigated the determinants of daily volatility for natural gas nearby month futures traded on the nymex within a garch framework augmented with market fundamentals consistent with the previous literature we found that volatility is much higher on the natural gas and crude oil storage report announcement days on mondays and during winters we also confirmed that high volatility is associated with divergence of storage levels and temperatures from seasonal norms the asymmetric impact of storage levels on volatility across different seasons is empirically investigated and documented the mainstream finding in the literature that lower storage levels result in higher volatility is valid only during winter at other times it is actually higher storage levels causing higher volatility also time to maturity effect is present only in winters additionally weather shocks have asymmetric impact on volatility depending on the sign of the shock finally we found that augmentation with market fundamentals improves the out of sample forecast accuracy of standard garch models

why environmental management may yield no regret pollution abatement options empirical evidence supports the existence of pollution abatement possibilities at negative costs the so called no regret options we provide a microeconomic rationale for the existence of such potential at the firm level an econometric application confirms that pollution abatement cost curves with no regret options are compatible with a standard production function as stated in our theoretical model c 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

are commodity prices chaotic we conduct tests for the presence of low dimensional chaotic structure in the futures prices of four important agricultural commodities though there is strong evidence of non linear dependence the evidence suggests that there is no long lasting chaotic structure the dimension estimates for the commodity futures series are generally much higher than would be for low dimension chaotic series our test results indicate that autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch type processes with controls for seasonality and contract maturity effects explain much of the non linearity in the data we make a case that employing seasonally adjusted price series is important in obtaining robust results via some of the existing tests for chaotic structure finally maximum likelihood methodologies that are robust to the non linear dynamics lend strong support to the samuelson hypothesis of maturity effects in futures price changes 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

market efficiency and risk premia in short term forward prices abstract using recursive estimation and rolling windows over extended sample periods we examine the time varying relationship between spot and short term forward prices in the pennsylvania new jersey maryland pjm wholesale electricity market we examine theoretical models of forward risk premia in electricity markets and show that recent data do not provide support for existing models the results indicate that short term forward prices have converged towards unbiased predictors of the subsequent spot prices

assessing emissions mitigation energy policy under integrated supply and demand analysis the colombian case the effects of greenhouse gases on climate variation set policy challenges for the energy industry the largest greenhouse gas contributor globally in this context the energy industry is being subjected to reforms focussing on the environment internalisation of emission costs and the promotion of cleaner technologies to overcome the challenges posed by the emission of greenhouse gases governments have implemented mitigation policies in the power supply industries most policy instruments include either financial incentives or goals and standards and these generate impacts on electricity prices and consumer behaviour this paper models policies effects on prices and demand through an integrated demand and supply analysis for the colombian case while simulation of carbon taxes shows important reductions of fossil fuelled power capacity a feed in tariff policy promotes clean technologies though not significantly reducing use of fossil technologies when applied simultaneously policy has a greater impact on both emission reductions and the diffusion of clean technologies while only increasing electricity prices slightly even when price elasticity of demand is low such policies may have a significant effect on the penetration of renewables and emissions furthermore this structured modelling of policy helps explain how the ultimate intended goal sustainable emissions reduction might be achieved

market price of risk implied by asian style electricity options and futures in this paper we propose a jump diffusion type model which recovers the main characteristics of electricity spot price dynamics in the nordic market including seasonality mean reversion and spiky behavior we show how the calibration of the market price of risk to actively traded futures contracts allows for efficient valuation of nord pool s asian style options written on the spot electricity price furthermore we study the evolution of the market price of risk and the risk premium over a three year time period and compare the obtained results with those reported in the literature

australian retail electricity prices can we avoid repeating the rising trend of the past abstract after a stable or declining real trend that persisted for more than half a century australian retail electricity prices have experienced a substantial increase in real terms since 2007 this has mainly been driven by increases in the cost of electricity distribution and to a lesser degree in the cost of electricity generation reducing greenhouse gas emissions which is a bipartisan political goal in australia will likely deliver further increases in generation costs due to the expected higher cost of low emission technology participating in global negotiations on emission reduction targets and designing efficient policy mechanisms have been a major focus of governments over the last several decades in contrast managing distribution system costs has received less attention while there were a number of factors which drove historical increases in distribution costs management of peak demand growth could help contain or reduce the extent to which consumers particularly households experience further increases in distribution costs the paper demonstrates how different combinations of carbon price and peak demand scenarios could impact future residential and industrial retail electricity prices to 2050 and discusses some behavioural and technological solutions to manage peak demand and potential barriers to their deployment

the stability of cigarette demand the relative effects of various governmental interventions upon cigarette consumption is important to policy makers historically the demand for cigarettes has been quite unstable previous studie

time variation in european carbon pass through rates in electricity futures prices the european union emissions trading scheme is a means to price emission allowances electricity market prices should reflect these market prices of emission allowances as they are a cost factor for power producers the pass through rate is the fraction of the emission allowance price that is passed through to electricity market prices it is often measured and presented as an average or a fixed estimate over some time period however we expect that the pass through rates should actually vary over time as electricity supply curves reflect the marginal costs of different producers that differ in emission intensity we apply a kalman filter approach to observe pass through rates in germany and u k and find strong support for time varying instead of fixed pass through rates although policy makers are interested in the impact of a policy on average our results indicate that one needs to be careful with the time frame over which pass through rates are measured for policy evaluation as an incorrect chosen evaluation period could cause an under or overestimation of the pass through rate in addition our model helps to provide policy makers with insight in the development of pass through rates when market circumstances change with respect to power production

rents in the european power sector due to carbon trading abstract the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets has imposed a price on the allowances for co2 emissions of electricity companies integrating this allowance price into the price of electricity earns a rent for companies who have received these allowances for free during phase i 2005 2007 rents corresponding to the aggregate value of allocated allowances amounted to roughly 13 billion per year however due to the specific price setting mechanism in electricity markets true rents were considerably higher this is due to the fact that companies also that have not received any allowances gain additional infra marginal rents to the extent that their variable costs are below the new market price after inclusion of the allowance price producers with low carbon emissions and low marginal costs thus also benefit substantially from carbon pricing this paper develops a methodology to determine the specific interaction of the imposition of such a co2 constraint and the price setting mechanism in the electricity sector under the assumption of marginal cost pricing in a liberalized european electricity market the article thus provides an empirical estimate of the true total rents of power producers during phase i of the eu ets 2005 2007 the eu ets generated in phase i additional rents in excess of 19 billion per year for electricity producers these transfers are distributed very unevenly between different electricity producers in a second step the paper assesses the impact of switching from free allocation to an auctioning of allowances in 2013 we show that such a switch to auctioning will continue to create additional infra marginal rents for certain producers and will leave the electricity sector as a whole better off than before the introduction of the eu ets

first evidence of asymmetric cost pass through of eu emissions allowances examining wholesale electricity prices in germany abstract we test the hypothesis that rising prices of emission allowances have a stronger impact on wholesale electricity prices than falling prices asymmetric cost pass through using an autoregressive distributed lag model we confirm this hypothesis for the german market

modelling the price spread between eua and cer carbon prices abstract this paper identifies factors impacting on the dynamics of the price spread between european allowances euas and certified emission reductions cers by detecting changes in the structural relationship between them while prior studies have assumed a fixed structural relationship this paper analyses the dynamic evolution of the price spread by employing a time varying parameter analysis using daily data from march 2008 to september 2011 the analysis reveals that a lack of competitive conditions in markets access constraints on the use and the availability of cers regulatory changes regarding both euas and cers and uncertainty surrounding cers can explain a significant portion of the price spread

the relationship between spot and futures prices in the nord pool electricity market abstract we analyze 11 years of historical spot and futures prices from the hydro dominated nord pool electricity market we find that futures prices tend to be higher than spot prices the average convenience yield is therefore negative but varies by season and depends on the storage levels in hydro reservoirs the average realized return on holding a long position in the futures market is also negative the negative convenience yield and risk premium contrast empirical findings in most other commodity markets we argue that differences between the supply and demand sides in terms of risk preferences and the ability to take advantage of short term price variations can contribute to explain the observed relationship between spot and futures prices in addition our analysis shows that the relationship between spot and futures prices is clearly linked to the physical state of the system such as hydro inflow reservoir levels and demand

the environmental and economic impact of the emissions trading scheme ets in vietnam abstract this study aims to fill a gap in the literature by examining the impacts of an emissions trading scheme ets in vietnam as the policy has been discussed for a decade in the country but the likely impacts on the economy and different sectors are still unidentified the simulations are carried out in a global energy computable general equilibrium cge model an extension of the gtap e model which treats vietnam as a country region results show that restricting the number of industrial sectors in the emissions trading market substantially affects the country s economy with a decline in real gdp by 4 57 however the country experiences much smaller adverse impacts e g real gdp declines by 1 78 when all industries participate in the emissions trading market in either case of the ets design the coal mining manufacturing transportation and electricity sectors are highly adversely affected however the crude oil and natural gas extraction sectors would experience expansion in their production levels due to substitutions for coal in general under the policy the emission levels from burning fossil fuels decline at significant rates particularly from the electricity generation sector

impact of the economic recession on the european power sector s co2 emissions abstract this paper investigates the impact of the economic recession on co 2 emissions in the european power sector during the years 2008 and 2009 three main determinants of the power sector s emissions are identified the demand for electricity the co 2 price and fuel prices a counterfactual scenario has been set up for each of these i e what these parameters would have been if not affected by the recession a simulation model of the european power sector is then employed comparing a historical reference simulation taking the parameters as actually occurred with the counterfactual scenarios the lower electricity demand due to the recession is shown to have by far the largest impact accounting for an emission reduction of about 175 mton the lower co 2 price due to the recession resulted in an increase in emissions by about 30 mton the impact of fuel prices is more difficult to retrieve an indicative reduction of about 17 mton is obtained mainly as a consequence of the low gas prices in 2009 the simulated combined impact of the parameters results in an emission reduction of about 150 mton in the european power sector over the years 2008 and 2009 as a consequence of the recession

the dynamic linkage effect between energy and emissions allowances price for regional emissions trading scheme pilots in china abstract china s emissions trading scheme cets pilots are emerging and fragmented markets these emissions allowances markets may exhibit a different fundamental price process from the european union s eu and the united states us emissions trading scheme ets the dynamic linkage effects between energy and emissions allowances prices are investigated for regional ets pilots in china using cointegration techniques the empirical results confirm that in the long run coal oil and natural gas prices are the main determinant factors of regional emissions allowances prices except for the second phase beijing ets pilots however their long run cointegration relationships in the beijing and shanghai pilots are not exactly in line with the guangdong and hubei pilots in the short run the changes in oil and natural gas prices in the second phase beijing ets pilot the natural gas prices in the shanghai ets pilot and the coal prices in the hubei ets pilot are found to have significant effects on regional emissions allowances prices in china finally regional energy pricing inefficiency regional emissions trading market overreaction and their inefficient fundaments may provide major obstacles in reducing the effectiveness of the fossil energy price pass through to emissions allowances prices in regional ets pilots

the impact of carbon pricing on a closed loop supply chain an australian case study concerns about industrial and supply chain implications on our natural environment have existed for decades climate change and greenhouse gas emissions have caused countries to implement various instruments ranging from taxes permits and voluntary incentives to required regulatory policies given this environment we develop a unified optimization model for a closed loop supply chain in which the carbon emission is expressed in terms of dollar carbon cost this study is one of the first to evaluate the forward and reverse supply chain influences on the carbon footprint a comparative analysis is completed with a decomposition of cost and environmental influences across supply chain functions we utilize data from a company located in australia where the government is currently introducing a carbon pricing scheme we find that variations in cost and environmental impacts occur over ranges of carbon pricing characteristics and patterns of the numerical results over these ranges provide insights for corporate key strategies and potential additional government policies these results and implications are analyzed along with limitations and directions for future research

an overview of co2 cost pass through to electricity prices in europe this paper investigates the link between wholesale electricity prices in europe and the co2 cost i e the price of european union allowances euas over the two first phases of the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets we set up a theoretical framework and an empirical model to estimate to what extent daily fluctuations of co2 costs may have impacted electricity prices regarding estimation results for the first phase of the eu ets about 42 of estimated pass through rates appear to be statistically significant while only one third of them are statistically different from zero in the second phase we try to improve those results by proposing alternative estimates based on the eu ets compliance periods

introducing the emissions trading system to china s electricity sector challenges and opportunities we examine the challenges and opportunities to introduce emissions trading ets in china s electricity sector in which the interaction between ets and electricity market reform plays a major role china s electricity sector is currently in a slow progress towards a more competitive and market based system both equal share dispatching policy and regulated wholesale and retail pricing policies pose significant challenges for implementation of ets in china s electricity sector one of the important points of ets is to give a price for carbon emissions and establish a cost pass through mechanism reminded that the essential of carbon pricing is to put a price on carbon emissions that is equal to discounted value of the external damages it should be regarded as a part of broader policy package for energy and resources price reform this will require that any low carbon power policy should be considered as a part of whole policy package aiming at further liberalizing the electricity sector in china three policy options are identified to incorporate ets with electricity reform under different circumstances a combination of those three options is also proposed to break the lock and reinforce the positive interaction between ets and the transition towards a competitive electricity system in link with current pilot ets designs a roadmap to introduce ets in a stepwise manner is suggested

sectors under scrutiny evaluation of indicators to assess the risk of carbon leakage in the uk and germany one of the central debates surrounding the design of the european union emissions trading scheme is the approach to address carbon leakage concerns correctly identifying the economic activities exposed to the risk of carbon leakage represents the first step in mitigating the risk effectively this paper assesses the robustness of the quantitative assessment criteria used by the european commission for phase 3 for example we apply the criteria to data for uk and germany and compare the results with the commissions assessment conducted at the aggregated eu level this reveals that sectors exposure risk to carbon leakage can vary across different member states due to differences in production processes technologies and fuel mix process emissions recycling rate differences product mix differences sector classification statistical boundaries activity allocation differences and finally difference in data quality overall we find that relative carbon intensity of sectors measured as cost increase relative to gross value added provides a robust metric the analysis also highlights the importance of using high quality and disaggregated data for this assessment

coevolution of policy market and technical price risks in the eu ets within the eu there have been calls for governments to provide greater certainty over carbon prices even though it is evident that their price risk is not entirely due to policy uncertainty we develop a stochastic simulation model of price formation in the eu ets to analyse the coevolution of policy market and technology risks under different initiatives the current situation of a weak 20 overall abatement target motivates various technology support interventions elevating policy uncertainty as the major source of carbon price risk in contrast taking a firm decision to move to a more stringent 30 cap would leave the eu ets price formation driven much more by market forces than by policy risks this leads to considerations of how much risk mitigation by governments would be appropriate and how much should be taken as business risk by the market participants

structural breaks and electricity prices further evidence on the role of climate policy uncertainties in the australian electricity market the primary objectives and the strategies of a national electricity market are the efficient delivery of network services and the electricity infrastructure to meet the long term consumer s interests therefore the objective of this study is to explore whether electricity prices across the six australian states display instability such instability is closely associated with the presence of structural breaks in relevance to policy events on australian carbon policies the study makes use of weekly australian wholesale electricity prices spanning the period from june 8th 2008 to march 30th 2014 along with linear and non linear unit root testing methodologies the results provide supportive evidence that the australian electricity market can be described as a less stable electricity market which implies that a high degree of market power is exercised by generators across regional markets these findings are expected to have substantial consequences for the effectiveness of carbon dioxide mitigating policies especially when there is uncertainty as to whether the planned environmental policy is put in place for the lifespan of undertaken investments