Investing in Bridging Fuels: The Unit Commitment Problem of Public vs. Private Ventures

Abstract

This paper presents an extensive comparison between public and private natural gas-fired units in managing the unit commitment problem in the context of the Greek electricity market. Using a unique hourly dataset from 2015–2019, our approach utilizes risk-weighted performance metrics—Cash Flows at Risk (CFaR) and Risk Weighted Return (RWR)—to analyze performance across the public and private units. Empirical findings indicate that publicly owned natural gas-fired units outperform privately owned natural gas-fired units in terms of operational efficiency, however the efficiency of privately owned natural gas-fired units is growing at a faster pace and is expected to surpass the efficiency of public units within 2 or 3 years.