In an era of energy transition involving an increase in renewable energy and a reduction in coal-fired power generation and nuclear power generation, the role of combined heat and power (CHP) as a bridging energy is highly emphasized. This article attempts to look empirically into the impact of increasing the share of renewable energy in total electricity generation on CHP share in total electricity generation in a cross-country context. Data from 35 countries during the period 2009–2015 were used, and the least absolute deviations estimator was applied to obtain a more robust parameter estimate. The results showed that a 1%p increase in the share of renewable energy significantly increased the CHP share by 0.87%p. Therefore, the hypothesis that CHP serves as bridge energy in the process of energy transition was established.

The South Korean natural gas (NG) import volume in 2017 was 33.7 million tonnes per annum (13.1%), making it the second-largest NG-importing country in the world after Japan. Nevertheless, the NG wholesale market in South Korea has remained monopolistic since the Korea Gas Corporation (KOGAS) was established in 1983. Thus, the purpose of this study is to determine whether the NG wholesale market in South Korea has economies of scale by estimating the translog cost function and estimating the minimum efficient scale (MES) using robust linear regression. We used quarterly business reports of KOGAS from the first quarter of 2000 to the second quarter of 2018 to construct the data. The results showed that diseconomies of scale existed in all the years in the first and fourth quarters, and the second quarter showed the same result during 2010–2014. From 2011, the production quantity of all the quarters has exceeded the MES (5.81 million tons). The reason for these results is that the demand for NG power generation and city gas has surged since 2000, while the monopolistic structure of the past has been maintained. This study implies that it would be more efficient to allocate some of KOGAS’s additional import volume to the existing private NG companies and mitigate the regulation on resale.