Where is moving the electricity sector and how are Electric Industry Investment Decisions Influenced by Potential Instability in the Regulatory Environment

摘要

The process of globalization, the institution of domestic competition, and the spread of neo-liberalism facilitated the rise of liberalization policy during the 1980s within the European Community. On the framework of this competition policy (the core of the Treaty of Rome), European governments moved to include electricity sector on their privatization and competition strategy. At Power Gen 2004 Dr. G. Dodero and Dr. V.Annoni presented in Barcelona Spain the following paper : Liberalization : success or not : Advantages and disadvantages of liberalization in power sector. The main reason of the difficulty of a real competition in power sector is physics : the difficulty of transporting and storing electricity prevents it from becoming a fully global industry in the operational sense. Because electricity cannot be easily stored and must be delivered by a costly interconnected network, geographical constraints reduce the opportunities of a real direct and remunerative competition in the global electricity sector. In the meanwhile from 2008 to now there was a huge increase of renewable assets whose generated power is becoming day by day more competitive and that are creating problems of their integration with fossil and nuclear generation mix. Within this short period of time the framework of electricity sector is changing, is subject to important challenges also because the operating hours of fossil and nuclear plants are reducing creating financial losses to the utilities and finally an increase of kWh prices to compensate at least partially these financial losses.