Johannes Mauritzen

Dead Battery? Wind Power, the Spot Market, and Hydro Power Interaction in the Nordic Electricity Market

It is well established within both the economics and power system engineering literature that hydropower can act as a complement to large amounts of intermittent energy. In particular hydropower can act as a “battery” where large amounts of wind power are installed. In this paper I use simple distributed lag models with data from Denmark and Norway. I find that increased wind power in Denmark causes increased marginal exports to Norway and that this effect is larger during periods of net exports when it is difficult to displace local production. Increased wind power can also be shown to slightly reduce prices in southern Norway in the short-run. Finally, I estimate that as much as 40 percent of wind power produced in Denmark is stored in Norwegian hydropower magazines.

What happens when it's windy in Denmark?: an empirical analysis of wind power on price volatility in the Nordic electricity market

This paper attempts to empirically test the effect that wind power production in Denmark has on volatility of the nordpool wholesale electricity prices. The main result is that wind power tends to significantly reduce intraday volatility but increases volatility over larger time windows. The negative elasticity for intraday volatility is likely due to a larger-in-magnitude price effect of wind power on peak hours then off-peak hours. I suggest that this in turn is due to a steeper supply schedule at peakloads. The positive elasticities in the wider time windows can be intuitively explained by the greater variability of the supply when large amounts of wind power are present. These finding have ramifications for investment in power generation, balancing as well as transmission capacity.

The Effect of Oil Prices on Field Production: Evidence from the Norwegian Continental Shelf

I use detailed field-level data on Norwegian off-shore oil field production and a semi-parametric additive model to control for the production profile of fields to estimate the effect of oil prices on production. I find no significant evidence of a concurrent reaction of field production to oil prices, though a slight lagged effect is found of the magnitude of approximately 2 to 4% for a 10 dollar per barrel increase in the real price of oil. Most of this effect appears to come in the planning phase of a field’s development.

Scrapping a Wind Turbine: Policy Changes, Scrapping Incentives and Why Wind Turbines in Good Locations Get Scrapped First

The most common reason for scrapping a wind turbine in Denmark is to make room for a newer turbine. The decision to scrap a wind turbine is then highly dependent on an opportunity cost that comes from the interaction of scarce land resources, technological change and changes in subsidy policy. Using a Cox regression model I show that turbines that are located in areas with better wind resources are at a higher risk of being scrapped. Policies put in place in order to encourage the scrapping of older, poorly placed turbines actually have a larger effect on well-placed turbines.

Now or Later? Trading wind power closer to real-time and how poorly designed subsidies lead to higher balancing costs

Simulation studies have pointed to the advantages of trading closer to real-time with large amounts of wind power. Using Danish data, I show that, as expected, shortfalls increase the probability of trade on the short-term market, Elbas. But in the period studied between 2010 and 2012 surpluses are shown to decrease the probability of trade. This unexpected result is likely explained by wind power policies that discourage trading on Elbas and lead to unnecessarily high balancing costs. I use a rolling-windows regression to support this claim.

Sun and Lemons: Getting Over Information Asymmetries in the California Solar Market

Using detailed data of approximately 125,000 solar photovoltaic systems installed in California between 2007 and 2014 I argue that the adoption of solar panels from Chinese manufacturers and the introduction of a leasing model for solar systems are closely intertwined. First, cheaper Chinese panels allowed a leasing model to be profitable for contractors. But an asymmetric information problem exists in the market for solar panels. Solar panels are long-lived productive assets, where quality is important but costly for individual consumers to verify. Consumers can instead be expected to rely on brands and observed reliability. This led to a barrier to entry for cheaper panels from new, primarily Chinese manufacturers. The adoption of a leasing model by several large local installers solved the asymmetric information problem and led to the adoption of Chinese panels and in turn lower overall system prices.

Real-time versus day-ahead market power in a hydro-based electricity market

We analyse in a theoretical framework the link between real-time and day-ahead market performance in a hydro-based and imperfectly competitive wholesale electricity market. Theoretical predictions of the model are tested on data from the Nordic power exchange, Nord Pool Spot (NPS).We reject the hypothesis that prices at NPS were at their competitive levels throughout the period under examination. The empirical approach uses equilibrium prices and quantities and does not rely on bid data nor on estimation of demand or marginal cost functions.

The Silver Lining of Price Spikes: How Electricity Price Spikes Can Help Overcome the Energy Efficiency Gap

Studies have shown that many consumers and businesses fail to invest in energy efficiency improvements despite seemingly ample financial incentives to do so – the so-called energy efficiency gap. Attempts to explain this gap often focus on searching costs, information frictions and behavioral factors. Using data on Norwegian electricity prices and Google searches for heat pumps, I suggest that the inherently spikey nature of many deregulated electricity markets – often seen as a sign of inefficiency – has a strong and significant positive effect on searching for information on energy efficiency goods. I attempt to identify the informational/behavioral effect by using a novel method of measuring spikiness: decomposing the price series into a range of Loess smoothed series and deviations from these curves.