Prices, Investment and Political Economy in Electricity

This piece puts together several strands of conceptual themes that are central to the design of electricity market architectures. It starts by delineating the economic characteristics of electricity (whose wholesale markets are inherently incomplete and imperfectly competitive). The role and scope of frequent price adaptation as a welfare maximizing tool is also discussed, as well as the complementary nature of price adaptation and capacity expansion, which can be compactly expressed with the help of variational inequalities. Finally, it points out some of the real-politik constraints that emerge in the process of reforming publicly-owned electricity systems and concludes with the need of using a transaction-cost approach in the reform design process.