Nuclear power has been a major topic of energy policy debate in Germany since the 1950s, and it was a key issue in all energiewende discussions. The March 2011 closure of seven nuclear power plants (the oldest in Germany) sparked an intense debate over the economic effects this might have,...

Competition policy is an important tool of governments to establish functioning markets, particularly in the scope of liberalizing the energy sector. An examination of horizontal divestitures in several markets suggests that in appropriate cases divestiture can enhance competition in the...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive multivariate cointegration analysis of three parts of the steam coal value chain — export, transport and import prices. The analysis is based on a rich dataset of international coal prices; in particular, we combine data on steam coal prices with...

Recognizing the growing importance of scientific benchmarking in water distribution, we provide a comprehensive survey of the available literature. We begin with a discussion about the (limited) use of benchmarking in the regulation of UK water utilities, and then extend the analysis to...

We analyze the impact of extensive wind development in Germany for the year 2015, focusing on grid extensions and price signals. We apply the electricity generation and network model ELMOD to compare zonal, nodal, and uniform pricing approaches. In addition to a reference case of network...

This paper applies nodal pricing as an economic approach to efficient use of electricity networks utilization for the fairly large German grid. We combine a straightforward welfare maximization with the technical specificities of electricity flows on a realistically large network. The nodal...

This paper presents a model of the European natural gas supply, GASMOD, which is structured as a two-stage-game of successive natural gas exports to Europe (upstream market) and wholesale trade within Europe (downstream market) and which explicitly includes infrastructure capacities. We compare...

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.