No abstract

Geographic diversification of wind farms can smooth out the fluctuations in wind power generation and reduce the associated system balancing and reliability costs. The paper uses historical wind production data from five European countries (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, and Spain) and applies Mean-Variance Portfolio theory to identify crosscountry portfolios that minimize the total variance of wind production for a given level of production. Theoretical unconstrained portfolios show that countries (Spain and Denmark) with the best wind resource or whose size contributes to smoothing out the country output variability dominate optimal portfolios. The methodology is then elaborated to derive optimal constrained portfolios taking into account national wind resource potential and transmission constraints and compare them with the projected portfolios for 2020. Such constraints limit the theoretical potential efficiency gains from geographical diversification, but there is still considerable room to improve performance from actual or projected portfolios. These results highlight the need for more cross-border interconnection capacity, for greater coordination of European renewable support policies, and for renewable support mechanisms and electricity market designs providing locational incentives. Under these conditions, a mechanism for renewables credits trading could help aligning wind power portfolios with the theoretically efficient geographic dispersion.

There is no academic consensus on which electricity market design provides the least distorting investment incentives. Theory suggests that "energy-only market" can allow capacity cost recovery by generators. However, separate payments for capacity or reserve obligations do not need to rely on infrequent price spikes to remunerate reserve capacity. Three years after the controversial change from the compulsory British Electricity Pool with capacity payments to the decentralised energyonly New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA), we contrast the two market designs in terms of investment incentives, analyse NETA's balancing market failures, and review the case for regulatory support for investment.