Market integration and regulation in European wholesale electricity markets : five essays on energy economics

This thesis analyzes the impact of specific structural breaks, e.g., product innovation, and regulatory interventions in European wholesale electricity markets. Unlike other markets such as those for convenience goods, network-bound industries, including railways, telecommunications, gas and electricity, have been restructured, liberalized and (partially) privatized only a bit more than a decade ago. In the European electricity sector, this process towards a market-based system was initiated in the 1990s. The focus of this thesis is on the wholesale level. In detail, the first part of the thesis centers around the aspect of the Internal Energy Market (IEM) and empirically analyzes the status of market integration. Part two of the thesis moves away from the issue of an IEM and analyzes the impact of two specific market interventions on competition in the wholesale electricity market. First, we discuss the impact of an implicit price cap on dominant generators and the market as a whole. The second intervention deals with the effect of generation based on renewable resources on the wholesale market.