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Start-up Costs and Market Power: Lessons from the Renewable Energy Transition
Akshaya Jha
Gordon Leslie
American Economic Review (Forthcoming)
Abstract
Firms expect to recover the fixed costs required to start production by earning
positive operating profits in subsequent periods. We develop a dynamic
competitive benchmark that accounts for start-up costs, showing that static
markups overstate the rents attributable to market power in an electricity
market where generators frequently stop and start production in response to
rooftop solar output. We demonstrate that the large-scale expansion of solar
capacity can lead to increases in the collective profitability of fossil-fuel plants
because competition softens at sunset—plants displaced by solar during the
day must incur start-up costs to compete in the evening.