The need to invest in new power generation is paramount all over the world. High prices on primary energy, security of supply issues and growing concern over climate change put an extra strain on supply options for the future. To meet these challenges, politicians put in place support schemes and other policy measures. These policy measures - full-scale experiments - sometimes interact very badly with competitive electricity markets.
It can be argued that most of the problems we face have little to do with electricity market design and that tighter regulation is not necessarily the solution. However, the issue is so important to society that even those of us who like competition and have been working hard this past decade to make competitive electricity markets work, must be prepared to rethink.