Electricity Markets in a Time of Change: A Call to Arms for Business Research

Abstract

Europe’s clean energy transition is imperative to combat climate change and represents an economic opportunity to become independent of fossil fuels. As such, the energy transition has become one of the most important, but also one of the most challenging economic and societal projects today. Electricity systems of the past were characterized by price-inelastic demand and only a small number of large electricity generators. The transition towards intermittent renewable energy sources changes this very paradigm. Future electricity systems will consist of many thousands of electricity generators and consumers that actively participate in markets, offering flexibility to balance variable electricity supply in markets with a high spatial and temporal resolution. These structural changes have ample consequences for market operators, generators, industrial consumers as well as prosumers. While a large body of the literature is devoted to the energy transition in engineering and the natural sciences, it has received relatively little attention in the recent business research literature, even though many of the central challenges for a successful energy transition are at the core of business research. Therefore, we provide an up-to-date overview of key questions in electricity market design and discuss how changes in electricity markets lead to new research challenges in business research disciplines such as accounting, business & information systems engineering, finance, marketing, operations management, operations research, and risk management.

A Friend in Need Is a Friend Indeed? Analysis of the Willingness to Share Self-Produced Electricity During a Long-lasting Power Outage

“…Since investigating incentives and resilience lies at the heart of organizational and thus business research (Williams et al. 2017 ), we argue that our work provides an important contribution in answering Bichler et al.’s ( 2022 ) “call to arms” for further research on energy networks in business literature (p. 3).…”

“…We thereby also answer calls for further research on energy transition in business research (Bichler et al. 2022 ).…”

“…On a broader perspective, Bichler et al. ( 2022 ) recently determined a general rarity of energy market studies in business research (Bichler et al. 2022 ).…”

“…( 2022 ) recently determined a general rarity of energy market studies in business research (Bichler et al. 2022 ). Since investigating incentives and resilience lies at the heart of organizational and thus business research (Williams et al.…”

Assessing the Scalability and Privacy of Energy Communities by Using a Large-Scale Distributed and Parallel Real-Time Optimization

“…To make the proposed real-time optimization flexible enough to be applicable even in the case of fast frequency reserve service and considering that higher communication delays can happen during the optimization in practice, we believe that a time window of a few seconds is desirable for the real-time optimization [36].…”