Abstract

The change from a subsidized zonal pricing system to a full nodal pricing regime in the new Mexican electricity market could improve the efficiency of electricity system operation. However, resulting price modifications might also swing surplus across producers and consumers. In this paper, we calculate nodal prices for the Mexican power system and further analyze how allocations of financial transmission rights (FTRs) can be used to mitigate resulting distributional effects. The share of FTRs to be allocated to different generation plants and loads is studied as a second step of an electricity tariff subsidy reform agenda that includes, as a first step, the change to nodal pricing and, as a third step, the reformulation of actual regressive subsidies in a progressive way. We test our model in a realistic nodal price setting, based on an hourly modeling of the Mexican power system.

Read the full article in The Energy Journal.