Investment with incomplete markets for risk: the need for long-term contracts

Barring subsidies, investment in the power generation sector has come to an almost complete halt in the restructured European power sector. Market and regulatory failures such as the well known missing money (see Joskow, (2006)) but also normal market features such as risk, possibly also affected by market failures like market incompleteness are mentioned as common causes for the situation. This paper discusses incomplete risk trading and its impact on investment. The analysis applies computable stochastic equilibrium models on a simple market model of the Energy Only type. The paper first compares the cases of complete and fully incomplete markets (full risk trading and no risk trading). It continues by testing the impact of different risk trading contracts on both welfare and investment. We successively consider Contracts for Difference, Reliability Options with and without physical back up that we add to our Energy Only market model. We test the impact of market liquidity on the results. Finally, we compare these methods to a Forward Capacity Market that we also add to the energy only model. We complete the paper by interpretation of these results in terms of hurdle rate implied by these risk-trading situations.