Please join the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Dr. David Newbery, Emeritus Professor and Director of The Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG) – Cambridge University, presenting a virtual seminar titled The Evolution of GB Electricity Markets and Regulation on Wednesday, February 1, 2023 from 9am-10am MT.

The UK was the first country in Europe to privatize and regulate its electricity supply industry from 1989, and led the way for subsequent EU reforms. However, the initial reform led to market power that prompted the Government to move from the Pool-based central dispatch design to an energy-only market (subsequently adopted by the EU) in 2001. That design failed to deliver adequate new flexible capacity and poor delivery of renewable electricity, prompting the 2013 Energy Act. That created a capacity market, a carbon price floor and Contracts for Difference with Feed-in-Tariffs for renewables, initially with a bureaucratic strike price, subsequently with auctions. In 2019 the Government announced tough decarbonisation targets for 2035, arguing that the existing market design would not deliver that target without further reform, discussed in the lecture. The Russian invasion and resulting energy crisis has complicated that reform, and learning how to cope continues.

Professor David Newbery, PhD., ScD., CBE, FBA, is the Director of the Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group and Emeritus Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has been President of the European Economic Association, 1996 and President of the International Association for Energy Economics, 2013. Educated at Cambridge with degrees in Mathematics and Economics, and a PhD in Economics, he has active research on electricity market integration, network charging, financing and integrating zero-carbon technologies (wind, PV, hydro, nuclear), the design of energy policy and energy taxation.