Data for: "Market Power and Price Exposure: Learning from Changes in Renewable Energy Regulation"

Given the key role of renewable energies in current and future electricity markets, it is important to understand how they affect firms' pricing incentives in these markets. In this paper, we study whether renewables depress electricity market prices, and how this effect depends on their degree of market price exposure. Our theoretical analysis shows that paying renewables with fixed prices, rather than with market-based prices, is relatively more effective at curbing market power when the dominant electricity firms own large shares of the renewable capacity, and <em>vice-versa</em>. To test this prediction, our empirical analysis leverages several short-lived changes to renewable energy pricing mechanisms in the Spanish electricity market. In this context, we find that the switch from full price exposure to fixed prices caused a 2-4% reduction in the average price-cost markup.