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Coal generator revenues and the rise of renewable generation: Evidence from Australia’s National Electricity Market

Crawford School of Public Policy
Photo by Marcus Wong on Wikimedia Commons

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 08 November 2022
2.00pm–3.30pm

Venue

Weston Theatre and Zoom

Speaker

Zsuzsanna Csereklyei, RMIT

This seminar will investigate the relationship between increasing shares of renewable generation and the wholesale market revenues of coal-fired generating units in Australia’s National Electricity Market. Renewable generation may influence coal generator revenues via both decreased spot market prices and reduced dispatch allocation. We use autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models on a high-frequency (30-minute) panel dataset between July 2017 and June 2021. We find that a one MWh increase in wind and solar generation is associated with decreases in coal generator revenues of A$0.0072–0.0083 and A$0.0040–0.0054 per megawatt of installed coal-fired generating capacity, respectively. This is using 2011-2012 dollars. These results are of potential use in informing managerial and policy decisions regarding coal plant exits in the coming decades.

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