Innovation by regulation: Smart electricity in Great Britain and Italy

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-04-14 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108368

Beatriz Couto Ribeiro , Tooraj Jamasb

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

With the rise of renewable and distributed energy sources, electricity distribution and transmission utilities are facing increasing demand by regulators to innovate and adopt new technologies and transit to smart grids. However, these regulated natural monopolies often lack economic incentives to develop and adopt new technologies. To overcome this barrier, some regulatory authorities have introduced the so-called “innovation-stimuli” regulations to foster experimentation, technological adoption and innovative solutions. We analyze and compare the effectiveness of two different innovation-stimuli regulations, the cost-pass through and WACC approaches, in Great Britain (GB) and Italy, respectively. To assess the impact of these different regulations on innovation, we use synthetic control (SC) and synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) methods, which constitute causal inference techniques for small-n case study design and, for the first time, are employed to assess the impact of regulations on innovation outputs. Our panel data encompasses 13 European countries covering 1995 to 2013 and used smart grid projects and patent applications as dependent variables. Meanwhile, cost-pass-through significantly and positively affected patent applications in the GB. In Italy, WACC did not affect patent applications, and European Commission-funded projects mostly drove the increases in smart-grid projects.

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监管创新：英国和意大利的智能电力

随着可再生能源和分布式能源的兴起，电力分配和传输公用事业正面临监管机构对创新和采用新技术以及向智能电网过渡的日益增长的需求。然而，这些受管制的自然垄断企业往往缺乏开发和采用新技术的经济动机。为了克服这一障碍，一些监管机构引入了所谓的“创新刺激”法规，以促进实验、技术采用和创新解决方案。我们分别在英国和意大利分析和比较了两种不同的创新刺激法规的有效性，即成本传递和WACC方法。为了评估这些不同法规对创新的影响，我们使用了综合控制（SC）和综合差中差（SDID）方法，这两种方法构成了小n案例研究设计的因果推理技术，并首次用于评估法规对创新产出的影响。我们的面板数据涵盖了1995年至2013年的13个欧洲国家，并使用智能电网项目和专利申请作为因变量。与此同时，成本传递显著且积极地影响了英国的专利申请。在意大利，WACC没有影响专利申请，欧盟委员会资助的项目主要推动了智能电网项目的增长。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.