Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The gas storage regulations are intended to increase security of supply in winter. Tenders and direct procurement by the Market Area Coordinator should ensure that gas storage facilities are filled. Both instruments can lead to a displacement of other storage volumes. Since direct procurement potentially leads to less displacement and allows for better control of strategic behavior, it may be more effective. Tender design can be improved by setting a reserve price and allowing storage obligation trading in a secondary market. Furthermore, separate tenders for withdrawal options, the elimination of the commodity price surcharge, and further adjustments can be beneficial.

We compare two commonly used mechanisms in public procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer's preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a general characterization of both mechanisms based on public scrutiny requirements and show—contrary to conventional wisdom—that an intransparent negotiation always yields higher social surplus than a transparent auction. Moreover, there exists a lower bound on the number of sellers such that the negotiation also generates a higher buyer surplus.

Procurement regulation aimed at curbing discrimination requires equal treatment of sellers. However, Deb and Pai (2017) show that such regulation imposes virtually no restrictions on the ability to discriminate. We propose a simple rule - imitation perfection - that restricts discrimination significantly. It ensures that in every equilibrium bidders with the same value distribution and the same valuation earn the same expected surplus. If all bidders are homogeneous, revenue and social surplus optimal auctions which are consistent with imitation perfection exist. For heterogeneous bidders however, it is incompatible with revenue and social surplus optimization. Thus, a trade-off between non-discrimination and optimality exists.

Driven by the climate conference in Paris in December 2015 countries worldwide are confronted with the question of how to shape their power system and how to establish alternative technologies to reduce harmful CO2 emissions. The German government plans that even before the year 2050, all electricity generated and consumed in Germany should be greenhouse gas neutral [1]. To successfully integrate renewable energies, a future energy system must be able to handle the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. One important means to address such electricity production variability is demand-side flexibility. Here, industry plays a major role in responding to variable electricity supply with adequate flexibility. This is where the Kopernikus project SynErgie comes in with more than 80 project partners from academia, industry, governmental, and non-governmental organizations as well as energy suppliers and network operators. The Kopernikus project SynErgie investigates how to best leverage demand-side flexibility in the German industry. The current electricity market design in Germany is not well suited to deal with increasing levels of re- newable energy, and it does not embrace demand-side flexibility. Almost 6 GW of curtailed power in 2019 provide evidence that changes are needed with respect to the rules governing electricity markets. These rules were designed at a time when electricity generation was concentrated on a few large and dispatchable conventional power plants and demand was considered inelastic. The SynErgie Cluster IV investigates how a future-proof electricity market design should be organized. The corresponding Work Package IV.3.1 more specifically deals with analyzing and designing allocation and pricing rules on electricity spot markets. The resulting design must be well suited to accommodate demand-side flexibility and address the intermittent nature of important renewable energy sources. This whitepaper is the result of a fruitful collaboration among the partners involved in SynErgie Cluster IV which include Germany's leading research organizations and practitioners in the field. The collaboration led to an expert workshop in October 2020 with participation from a number of international energy market experts such as Mette Bjørndal (NHH), Endre Bjørndal (NHH), Peter Cramton (University of Maryland and University of Cologne), and Raphael Heffron (University of Dundee). The whitepaper details the key recommendations from this workshop. In particular, the whitepaper recommends a move to a locational, marginal price-based system together with new bidding formats allowing to better express flexibility. We argue in favor of a one-step introduction of locational, marginal prices instead of repeatedly splitting existing zones. Frequent zone splitting involves recurring political debates as well as short- and long-run instabilities affecting the basis for financial con- tracts, for example. Importantly, the definition of stable prize zones is very challenging with increasing levels of distributed and renewable energy sources. The recommendation is the outcome of an intense debate about advantages and downsides of different policy alternatives. However, such a transition to locational, marginal prices is not without challenges, and it is a call to arms for the research community, policymak- ers, and practitioners to develop concepts on how to best facilitate the transition and ensure a reliable and efficient electricity market of the future. We'd like to thank all the project partners and are grateful for the financial support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as well as the Project Management Jülich. Hans Ulrich Buhl (Cluster Lead) Martin Bichler (Work Package Lead)