Energy | Electricity | Working Paper
The welfare and price effects of sector coupling with power-to-gas
16 July 2019

Authors: ROACH, Martin; MEEUS, Leonardo

Electricity markets with high installed capacities of Variable Renewable Energy Sources (VRES) experience periods of supply and demand mismatch, resulting in near-zero and even negative prices, or energy spilling due to surplus. The participation of emerging Power-to-X solutions in a sector coupling paradigm, such as Power-to-Gas (PTG), has been envisioned to provide a source of demand flexibility to the power sector and decarbonize the gas sector. We advance a long-run equilibrium model to study the PTG investment decision from the point of view of a perfectly competitive electricity and gas system where each sector’s market is cleared separately but coupled by PTG. Under scenarios combining PTG technology costs and electricity RES targets, we study whether or not there is a convergence in the optimal deployment of PTG capacity and what is the welfare distribution across both sectors. We observe that PTG can play an important price-setting role in the electricity market, but PTG revenues from arbitrage opportunities erodes as more PTG capacity is installed. We find that the electricity and gas sector have aligned incentives to cooperate around PTG, and instead find an issue of misaligned incentives related to the PTG actor. Although not the focus of our analysis, in some scenarios we find that the welfare optimal PTG capacity results in a loss for the PTG actor, which reveals some intuition that subsidizing PTG can make sense to reduce the cost of RES subsidies. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to contextualize these findings for system specificities.
logo cadmus Read it on Cadmus Download in open access

LATEST FSR PUBLICATIONS

Working Paper
The digitalisation of the energy sector is giving rise to energy data spaces that aim to support secure, interoperable, and sovereign data sharing among stakeholders. While the focus has mainly [...]
Technical Report
This report reviews evidence collected during the third year of the LIFE COASE project co-funded by the European Commission. It summarises two events held over the summer of 2025. The [...]
Policy Brief
The European Union (EU) is approaching a crucial moment in its climate and industrial strategy. As work begins on the 2026 review of the EU Emis sions Trading System (ETS), [...]

Join our community

To meet, discuss and learn in the channel that suits you best.

scroll

top