A framework for analysing the governance of auctions for renewable energy

Auctions have become the most important policy instrument for promoting renewable energies and are gaining a fundamental importance in electricity policy in general. Whereas the literature on energy policy has acted upon this fundamental policy evolution, it focusses on auctions’ design, overlooking auctions’ governance. There is so far no literature addressing the crucial question of who governs auctions. This paper addresses this gap by providing a series of conceptual, methodological and theoretical building blocks to investigate auctions’ governance. First, it identifies a series of key variables related to auctions governance : e.g. their degree of regulation, the extent to which private operators are involved in the elaboration of auctions’ regulation and what type of actor is leading auctions’ governance. Second, it provides methodological tools to systematically measure these variables with indices (e.g. regulation index, private regulation index, actor influence index). Third, it shows the usefulness of the indices for qualifying RE auctions governance arrangements by applying them to three carefully selected cases to cover very different countries, ranging from full to very limited liberalization: The United Kingdom, Mexico and Morocco.