IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v110y2017icp150-166.html

Early nuclear retirements in deregulated U.S. markets: Causes, implications and policy options

Author

Listed:
  • Haratyk, Geoffrey

Abstract

Electricity prices have fallen significantly since 2008, putting commercial nuclear reactors in the United States under substantial financial pressure. In this market environment driven by persistently low natural gas prices and stagnant electricity demand, we estimate that about two thirds of the 102GW nuclear capacity are uncompetitive over the next few years under the current trajectory. Among those, 18GW are retiring or are merchant plants at high risk of retiring prematurely.

Suggested Citation

  • Haratyk, Geoffrey, 2017. "Early nuclear retirements in deregulated U.S. markets: Causes, implications and policy options," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 150-166.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:enepol:v:110:y:2017:i:c:p:150-166
    DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2017.08.023
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517305177
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.08.023?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

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Harris, Grant & Heptonstall, Phil & Gross, Robert & Handley, David, 2013. "Cost estimates for nuclear power in the UK," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 431-442.
    2. G. Cornelis van Kooten & Craig M.T. Johnston, 2016. "The Economics of Forest Carbon Offsets," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 8(1), pages 227-246, October.
    3. Lucas Davis & Catherine Hausman, 2016. "Market Impacts of a Nuclear Power Plant Closure," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 8(2), pages 92-122, April.
    4. Linares, Pedro & Conchado, Adela, 2013. "The economics of new nuclear power plants in liberalized electricity markets," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(S1), pages 119-125.
    5. Kallio, A.M.I. & Salminen, O. & Sievänen, R., 2016. "Forests in the Finnish low carbon scenarios," Journal of Forest Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(C), pages 45-62.
    6. World Bank Group & ECOFYS, "undated". "Carbon Pricing Watch 2016," World Bank Publications - Reports 24288, The World Bank Group.
    7. repec:aen:journl:2000v21-03-a03 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. repec:aen:eeepjl:1_2_a07 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Olukunle O. Owolabi & Toryn L. J. Schafer & Georgia E. Smits & Sanhita Sengupta & Sean E. Ryan & Lan Wang & David S. Matteson & Mila Getmansky Sherman & Deborah A. Sunter, 2021. "Role of Variable Renewable Energy Penetration on Electricity Price and its Volatility Across Independent System Operators in the United States," Papers 2112.11338, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2022.
    2. Jia Zhou & Hany Abdel-Khalik & Paul Talbot & Cristian Rabiti, 2021. "A Hybrid Energy System Workflow for Energy Portfolio Optimization," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(15), pages 1-28, July.
    3. Mills, Andrew & Wiser, Ryan & Millstein, Dev & Carvallo, Juan Pablo & Gorman, Will & Seel, Joachim & Jeong, Seongeun, 2021. "The impact of wind, solar, and other factors on the decline in wholesale power prices in the United States," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 283(C).
    4. SarahM. Jordaan & Afreen Siddiqi & William Kakenmaster & AliceC. Hill, 2019. "The Climate Vulnerabilities of Global Nuclear Power," Global Environmental Politics, MIT Press, vol. 19(4), pages 3-13, November.
    5. Bah, Muhammad Maladoh & Weigt, Hannes, 2026. "Early nuclear power plant retirement and policy choices in the New York electricity market," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 208(C).
    6. Knapp, Vladimir & Pevec, Dubravko, 2018. "Promises and limitations of nuclear fission energy in combating climate change," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 94-99.
    7. Yuan, Mengyao & Tong, Fan & Duan, Lei & Dowling, Jacqueline A. & Davis, Steven J. & Lewis, Nathan S. & Caldeira, Ken, 2020. "Would firm generators facilitate or deter variable renewable energy in a carbon-free electricity system?," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 279(C).
    8. Hsiao, Cody Yu-Ling & Chen, Hsing Hung, 2018. "The contagious effects on economic development after resuming construction policy for nuclear power plants in Coastal China," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 291-302.
    9. Reimers, Andrew & Cole, Wesley & Frew, Bethany, 2019. "The impact of planning reserve margins in long-term planning models of the electricity sector," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 1-8.
    10. Mills, Andrew D. & Levin, Todd & Wiser, Ryan & Seel, Joachim & Botterud, Audun, 2020. "Impacts of variable renewable energy on wholesale markets and generating assets in the United States: A review of expectations and evidence," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    11. Bah, Muhammad Maladoh, 2023. "State and federal nuclear support schemes in dynamic electricity market conditions: Insights from NYISO and PJM," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 182(C).

    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. Phil Johnstone & Andy Stirling, 2015. "Comparing Nuclear Power Trajectories inGermany And the UK: From ‘Regimes’ to ‘Democracies’ in Sociotechnical Transitions and Discontinuities," SPRU Working Paper Series 2015-18, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    2. Rinne, Sonja, 2018. "Radioinactive: Are nuclear power plant outages in France contagious to the German electricity price?," CIW Discussion Papers 3/2018, University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW).
    3. Geissmann, Thomas, 2017. "A probabilistic approach to the computation of the levelized cost of electricity," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 372-381.
    4. Jeong, Minsoo & You, Jung S., 2022. "Estimating the economic costs of nuclear power plant outages in a regulated market using a latent factor model," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).
    5. Yagi, Chihiro & Takeuchi, Kenji, 2024. "Electricity storage or transmission? Comparing social welfare between electricity arbitrages," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    6. Erik P. Johnson & Juan Moreno-Cruz, 2020. "Congestion in the Electricity Transmission System Redistributes Pollution across Long Distances," CESifo Working Paper Series 8483, CESifo.
    7. Lovering, Jessica R. & Yip, Arthur & Nordhaus, Ted, 2016. "Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 371-382.
    8. Takeshi Kawakatsu & Soochoel Lee & Sven Rudolph, 2017. "The Japanese Carbon Tax And The Challenges To Low-Carbon Policy Cooperation In East Asia," Discussion papers e-17-009, Graduate School of Economics , Kyoto University.
    9. Shirizadeh, Behrang & Quirion, Philippe, 2021. "Low-carbon options for the French power sector: What role for renewables, nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    10. Jesse Buchsbaum & Catherine Hausman & Johanna L Mathieu & Jing Peng, 2024. "Spillovers from ancillary services to wholesale energy markets," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 55(1), pages 87-111, March.
    11. Steven M. Smith, 2019. "The Relative Economic Merits of Alternative Water Rights," Working Papers 2019-08, Colorado School of Mines, Division of Economics and Business.
    12. Wang, Linyuan & Zhao, Lin & Mao, Guozhu & Zuo, Jian & Du, Huibin, 2017. "Way to accomplish low carbon development transformation: A bibliometric analysis during 1995–2014," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 68(P1), pages 57-69.
    13. Connolly, D. & Lund, H. & Mathiesen, B.V., 2016. "Smart Energy Europe: The technical and economic impact of one potential 100% renewable energy scenario for the European Union," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 1634-1653.
    14. Li, Jing & Renuart, Bryanna, 2023. "Environmental Impact of 2011 Germany's Nuclear Shutdown: A Synthetic Control Study," 2023 Annual Meeting, July 23-25, Washington D.C. 335434, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    15. Wealer, B. & Bauer, S. & Hirschhausen, C.v. & Kemfert, C. & Göke, L., 2021. "Investing into third generation nuclear power plants - Review of recent trends and analysis of future investments using Monte Carlo Simulation," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    16. Brittany Tarufelli & Ben Gilbert, 2019. "Leakage in Regional Climate Policy? Implications of Electricity Market Design," Working Papers 2019-07, Colorado School of Mines, Division of Economics and Business, revised Dec 2021.
    17. Hurmekoski, Elias & Kunttu, Janni & Heinonen, Tero & Pukkala, Timo & Peltola, Heli, 2023. "Does expanding wood use in construction and textile markets contribute to climate change mitigation?," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    18. Bello, Carolina & Culot, Laurence & Ruiz Agudelo, Cesar Augusto & Galetti, Mauro, 2021. "Valuing the economic impacts of seed dispersal loss on voluntary carbon markets," Ecosystem Services, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    19. Perrier, Quentin, 2018. "The second French nuclear bet," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 858-877.
    20. Perrier, Quentin, "undated". "The French Nuclear Bet," ESP: Energy Scenarios and Policy 256058, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:110:y:2017:i:c:p:150-166. 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.