Ed Platt, vice president of Solomon Associates’ power group, and Richard Jones, the group’s director of statistics and risk modeling, assess the potential impact of cap-and-trade legislation on U.S. power plant operations, based on an analysis of European operators after the introduction of carbon trading by the European Union in 2005, in the January 2010 issue of Power Magazine.
Write Platt and Jones:
Despite the significant differences between the North American and European markets, Solomon Associates has identified a number of trends in European power unit performance since 2005 that may prove useful to U.S. and Canadian generators as they prepare for a carbon-constrained market. Most notably, North American generators may be surprised to see the abrupt changes in plant utilization that European units experienced with the introduction of carbon trading — a phenomenon likely to be repeated in the U.S. and Canada.
