Electricity Markets in a Time of Change: A Call to Arms for Business Research

Europe’s clean energy transition is imperative to combat climate change and represents an economic opportunity to become independent of fossil fuels. As such, the energy transition has become one of the most important, but also one of the most challenging economic and societal projects today. Electricity systems of the past were characterized by price-inelastic demand and only a small number of large electricity generators. The transition towards intermittent renewable energy sources changes this very paradigm. Future electricity systems will consist of many thousands of electricity generators and consumers that actively participate in markets, offering flexibility to balance variable electricity supply in markets with a high spatial and temporal resolution. These structural changes have ample consequences for market operators, generators, industrial consumers as well as prosumers. While a large body of the literature is devoted to the energy transition in engineering and the natural sciences, it has received relatively little attention in the recent business research literature, even though many of the central challenges for a successful energy transition are at the core of business research. Therefore, we provide an up-to-date overview of key questions in electricity market design and discuss how changes in electricity markets lead to new research challenges in business research disciplines such as accounting, business & information systems engineering, finance, marketing, operations management, operations research, and risk management.

A spatiotemporal atlas of hydropower in Africa for energy modelling purposes

The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diurnal and seasonal scales across all continents, this is not yet the case for hydropower. Here, we present a newly developed open-access African hydropower atlas, containing seasonal hydropower generation profiles for nearly all existing and several hundred future hydropower plants on the African continent. The atlas builds on continental-scale hydrological modelling in combination with detailed technical databases of hydropower plant characteristics and can facilitate modelling of power systems across Africa.

Biden backing spurs US offshore wind development

Significance Two large-scale wind farms have now received federal approval and Washington is bolstering its permitting capacity in response to a pipeline of projects now totalling more than 35 gigawatts. The emergence of offshore wind means renewables are likely to extend their already impressive domination of new generation capacity additions. Impacts System flexibility requirements will grow as a higher proportion of generation comes from variable sources. The growth of offshore wind supply chains should support substantial employment opportunities, both direct and indirect. As in Europe, US electricity systems are likely to face new grid investment and congestion challenges related to offshore wind.