Electricity contract design and wholesale market outcomes in Australia's National Electricity Market
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Easton, Stephanie
Wand, Lewis
Gilmore, Joel
Nolan, Tahlia
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The emergence of variable renewable energy (VRE) technologies has created a range of different energy contracting techniques. Within Australia's National Electricity Market (NEM), Run-of-Plant (RoP) Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) became the most common form of contract with purchasers of wind and solar energy agreeing to pay a fixed price for energy irrespective of when it is produced and, therefore, its actual value to the market. In November 2023, the Commonwealth Government adopted a 32 GW RoP PPA Contract-for-Difference (CfD) underwriting policy that aims to effectively shield the generator from market price risk. This article discusses different contract structures and their impact on participant behaviour during periods of material oversupply and negative prices. We find that embedded solar PV exports into the distribution network, which are not required to dynamically participate in the wholesale market, have increased wholesale energy supply, enabling profit maximising vertically integrated renewable firms to drive prices lower in a manner that partially strands the output of RoP PPA CfD generators with a $0/MWh price floor. A key conclusion from our analysis is that requiring embedded solar PV to effectively participate in the wholesale market appears to be a pre-condition for the efficacy of government-initiated RoP PPA CfDs.
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Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics
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© 2024 The Author(s). The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Environment and resource economics
Applied economics
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Nelson, T; Easton, S; Wand, L; Gilmore, J; Nolan, T, Electricity contract design and wholesale market outcomes in Australia's National Electricity Market, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 2024