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Gas Games with Electricity - Kelly Neill

Tracks
Room: CBE LT2
Thursday, June 29, 2023
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM

Overview

INDUSTRIAL ORGANISAITION Convenor: Rohan Pitchford


Speaker

Dr Kelly Neill
Lecturer
University of Sydney

Gas Games with Electricity

Abstract

If large natural gas firms also generate electricity, is this detrimental for trade and competition? I consider eastern Australia, where three large firms dominate the market for natural gas, and also generate a significant volume of electricity from all fuel types. This is a unique opportunity to study the links between gas and electricity, because both markets are deregulated, and organized as uniform-price auctions. I also make a methodological contribution, by undertaking the first estimation of a supply function equilibrium with asymmetric information. Two potential issues arise. First, when gas firms generate electricity from non-gas fuels, such as coal and renewables, they may have an incentive to raise the gas costs for rival gas-fired generators, because this is passed through to higher electricity prices. I estimate that this has raised the price of gas on average, but by a modest 0.8 percent. Second, when gas firms generate electricity using gas as a fuel, they can use the realized gas price to improve their forecast of their own electricity generation levels. The resulting adverse selection problem leads to steeper gas-market supply schedules, and has reduced gains from trade by 10 percent on average. For the Australian market, adverse selection is more important, and increasing the frequency with which the gas market is cleared could improve market outcomes.

Biography

Kelly is a Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. She is also a Non-resident Scholar at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. Her research interests are empirical industrial organization and energy economics, with a focus on natural gas markets. She graduated with a PhD in Economics from Rice University in 2022.
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