Competition and environmental policies in an electricity sector

We study the impact of competition and environmental policy (feed-in tariff vs. the EU ETS) on investment, CO2 emissions and welfare in an electricity sector. We consider different market structures (a planner who maximises social welfare vs. duopoly) and two types of consumers (those whose behaviour depends on the weather vs. those whose behaviour does not). The demand specification is innovative and takes incompressible consumption into account. Given the costs and demand functions, we find that competition can increase CO2 emissions, as is highlighted by Mansur (2007). In duopoly, the EU ETS seems to be the only efficient policy for reducing CO2 emissions but also to increase the share of production based on renewable energy sources. The retained feed-in tariff policy seems to be the most expensive policy in terms of “social welfare”. Even if this policy seems to increase “social welfare”, feed-in tariffs increase the CSPE, which is paid for by consumers in the form of higher electricity prices and only benefits new entrants. It is also less effective in terms of emission reduction.