Are Italian Electricity Zonal Prices affected by Technologies, Market Concentration and Congestions?"

In the last few years we have observed deregulation in electricity markets and an increasing interest of price dynamics has been developed especially to consider all stylized facts shown by spot prices. Only few papers have considered the Italian Electricity Spot market since it has been deregulated recently. Therefore, this contribution is an investigation with emphasis on price dynamics accounting for technologies, market concentration and congestions as well as extreme spiky behavior. Most papers consider daily arithmetic mean of 24 hourly spot prices, but this produces a distortion because of the existence of spikes, therefore we have considered median values to correct for outliers. We aim to understand how technologies, concentration and congestions affect zonal prices since these ones combine to bring about the single national price (prezzo unico d'acquisto, PUN). Hence, understanding its features is important for drawing policy indications referred to production planning and selection of generation sources, pricing and risk-hedging problems, monitoring of market power positions and finally to motivate investment strategies in new power plants and grid interconnections. Implementing Reg-ARFIMA models, we draw policy indications based on the empirical evidence that technologies, concentration and congestions affect Italian electricity prices.