IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v95y2016icp280-290.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The plunge in German electricity futures prices – Analysis using a parsimonious fundamental model

Author

Listed:
  • Kallabis, Thomas
  • Pape, Christian
  • Weber, Christoph

Abstract

The German market has seen a plunge in wholesale electricity prices from 2007 until 2014, with base futures prices dropping by more than 40%. This is frequently attributed to the unexpected high increase in renewable power generation. Using a parsimonious fundamental model, we determine the respective impact of supply and demand shocks on electricity futures prices. The used methodology is based on a piecewise linear approximation of the supply stack and time-varying price-inelastic demand. This parsimonious model is able to replicate electricity futures prices and discover non-linear dependencies in futures price formation. We show that emission prices have a higher impact on power prices than renewable penetration. Changes in renewables, demand and installed capacities turn out to be similarly important for explaining the decrease in operation margins of conventional power plants. We thus argue for the establishment of an independent authority to stabilize emission prices.

Suggested Citation

  • Kallabis, Thomas & Pape, Christian & Weber, Christoph, 2016. "The plunge in German electricity futures prices – Analysis using a parsimonious fundamental model," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 280-290.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:enepol:v:95:y:2016:i:c:p:280-290
    DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2016.04.025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516301938
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.04.025?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. de Perthuis, Christian & Trotignon, Raphael, 2014. "Governance of CO2 markets: Lessons from the EU ETS," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 100-106.
    2. Rathmann, M., 2007. "Do support systems for RES-E reduce EU-ETS-driven electricity prices?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 342-349, January.
    3. Markus Burger & Bernhard Klar & Alfred Muller & Gero Schindlmayr, 2004. "A spot market model for pricing derivatives in electricity markets," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 4(1), pages 109-122.
    4. Viehmann, Johannes, 2011. "Risk premiums in the German day-ahead Electricity Market," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 386-394, January.
    5. Cartea, Álvaro & Villaplana, Pablo, 2008. "Spot price modeling and the valuation of electricity forward contracts: The role of demand and capacity," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(12), pages 2502-2519, December.
    6. René Aïd & Luciano Campi & Adrien Nguyen Huu & Nizar Touzi, 2009. "A Structural Risk-Neutral Model Of Electricity Prices," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 12(07), pages 925-947.
    7. Koch, Nicolas & Fuss, Sabine & Grosjean, Godefroy & Edenhofer, Ottmar, 2014. "Causes of the EU ETS price drop: Recession, CDM, renewable policies or a bit of everything?—New evidence," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 676-685.
    8. Sáenz de Miera, Gonzalo & del Ri­o González, Pablo & Vizcaino, Ignacio, 2008. "Analysing the impact of renewable electricity support schemes on power prices: The case of wind electricity in Spain," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(9), pages 3345-3359, September.
    9. repec:dau:papers:123456789/13539 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Pahle, Michael, 2010. "Germany's dash for coal: Exploring drivers and factors," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(7), pages 3431-3442, July.
    11. Ketterer, Janina C., 2014. "The impact of wind power generation on the electricity price in Germany," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 270-280.
    12. repec:dau:papers:123456789/11500 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Hendrik Bessembinder & Michael L. Lemmon, 2002. "Equilibrium Pricing and Optimal Hedging in Electricity Forward Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(3), pages 1347-1382, June.
    14. M. T. Barlow, 2002. "A Diffusion Model For Electricity Prices," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(4), pages 287-298, October.
    15. Weron, Rafał, 2014. "Electricity price forecasting: A review of the state-of-the-art with a look into the future," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 1030-1081.
    16. Van den Bergh, Kenneth & Delarue, Erik & D'haeseleer, William, 2013. "Impact of renewables deployment on the CO2 price and the CO2 emissions in the European electricity sector," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 1021-1031.
    17. Weigt, Hannes & Ellerman, Denny & Delarue, Erik, 2013. "CO2 abatement from renewables in the German electricity sector: Does a CO2 price help?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(S1), pages 149-158.
    18. Jónsson, Tryggvi & Pinson, Pierre & Madsen, Henrik, 2010. "On the market impact of wind energy forecasts," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 313-320, March.
    19. Weigt, Hannes & Hirschhausen, Christian von, 2008. "Price formation and market power in the German wholesale electricity market in 2006," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(11), pages 4227-4234, November.
    20. Benth, Fred Espen & Cartea, Álvaro & Kiesel, Rüdiger, 2008. "Pricing forward contracts in power markets by the certainty equivalence principle: Explaining the sign of the market risk premium," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(10), pages 2006-2021, October.
    21. Fama, Eugene F, 1970. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 25(2), pages 383-417, May.
    22. Sensfuß, Frank & Ragwitz, Mario & Genoese, Massimo, 2008. "The merit-order effect: A detailed analysis of the price effect of renewable electricity generation on spot market prices in Germany," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(8), pages 3076-3084, August.
    23. Rene Carmona & Michael Coulon & Daniel Schwarz, 2012. "Electricity price modeling and asset valuation: a multi-fuel structural approach," Papers 1205.2299, arXiv.org.
    24. Pape, Christian & Hagemann, Simon & Weber, Christoph, 2016. "Are fundamentals enough? Explaining price variations in the German day-ahead and intraday power market," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 376-387.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:dui:wpaper:1504 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Pape, Christian & Hagemann, Simon & Weber, Christoph, 2016. "Are fundamentals enough? Explaining price variations in the German day-ahead and intraday power market," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 376-387.
    3. repec:dui:wpaper:1502 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Gürtler, Marc & Paulsen, Thomas, 2018. "The effect of wind and solar power forecasts on day-ahead and intraday electricity prices in Germany," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 150-162.
    5. Andreas Wagner, 2014. "Residual Demand Modeling and Application to Electricity Pricing," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 2).
    6. Christian Pape, 2017. "The impact of intraday markets on the market value of flexibility–Decomposing effects on profile and the imbalance costs," EWL Working Papers 1711, University of Duisburg-Essen, Chair for Management Science and Energy Economics, revised Dec 2017.
    7. Deschatre, Thomas & Féron, Olivier & Gruet, Pierre, 2021. "A survey of electricity spot and futures price models for risk management applications," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    8. Dillig, Marius & Jung, Manuel & Karl, Jürgen, 2016. "The impact of renewables on electricity prices in Germany – An estimation based on historic spot prices in the years 2011–2013," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 7-15.
    9. Espinosa, María Paz & Pizarro-Irizar, Cristina, 2018. "Is renewable energy a cost-effective mitigation resource? An application to the Spanish electricity market," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 902-914.
    10. Russo, Marianna & Bertsch, Valentin, 2020. "A looming revolution: Implications of self-generation for the risk exposure of retailers," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    11. Pape, Christian, 2018. "The impact of intraday markets on the market value of flexibility — Decomposing effects on profile and the imbalance costs," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 186-201.
    12. Rene Carmona & Michael Coulon & Daniel Schwarz, 2012. "Electricity price modeling and asset valuation: a multi-fuel structural approach," Papers 1205.2299, arXiv.org.
    13. Jägemann, Cosima, 2014. "An illustrative note on the system price effect of wind and solar power - The German case," EWI Working Papers 2014-10, Energiewirtschaftliches Institut an der Universitaet zu Koeln (EWI).
    14. Coulon, Michael & Powell, Warren B. & Sircar, Ronnie, 2013. "A model for hedging load and price risk in the Texas electricity market," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 976-988.
    15. Füss, Roland & Mahringer, Steffen & Prokopczuk, Marcel, 2015. "Electricity derivatives pricing with forward-looking information," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 34-57.
    16. Fred Espen Benth & Jūratė Šaltytė Benth & Steen Koekebakker, 2008. "Stochastic Modeling of Electricity and Related Markets," World Scientific Books, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., number 6811, January.
    17. Thao Pham & Killian Lemoine, 2020. "Impacts of subsidized renewable electricity generation on spot market prices in Germany : Evidence from a GARCH model with panel data," Working Papers hal-02568268, HAL.
    18. Goodarzi, Shadi & Perera, H. Niles & Bunn, Derek, 2019. "The impact of renewable energy forecast errors on imbalance volumes and electricity spot prices," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    19. Iván Blanco, Juan Ignacio Peña, and Rosa Rodriguez, 2018. "Modelling Electricity Swaps with Stochastic Forward Premium Models," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 2).
    20. George Daskalakis, Lazaros Symeonidis, Raphael N. Markellos, 2015. "Electricity futures prices in an emissions constrained economy: Evidence from European power markets," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3).
    21. Bell, William Paul & Wild, Phillip & Foster, John & Hewson, Michael, 2017. "Revitalising the wind power induced merit order effect to reduce wholesale and retail electricity prices in Australia," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 224-241.
    22. Ruoyang Li & Alva Svoboda & Shmuel Oren, 2015. "Efficiency impact of convergence bidding in the california electricity market," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 245-284, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:enepol:v:95:y:2016:i:c:p:280-290. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.