Some design lessons from market-based greenhouse gas regulation in the restructured Australian electricity industry

There is growing worldwide interest in the use of market-based policy instruments for climate change regulation in the electricity sector. These mechanisms would seem to offer some efficiency and flexibility advantages over more traditional regulatory approaches, while being highly compatible with competitive market-based electricity industries. Australia has been an early and enthusiastic adopter of both electricity industry restructuring and market-based environmental instruments. This paper first outlines some of these recent policy developments. In particular, we describe the objectives, design and outcomes to date of electricity industry restructuring, the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, the NSW Greenhouse Benchmarks, the Queensland 13% Gas scheme and Government accredited Green Power. From this, we draw some key design lessons for such market-based instruments. These include the perils of abstraction in scheme design, the vital importance of setting appropriate baselines in ‘baseline and credit’ schemes, the possibility that such measures may interact in ways that reduce their environmental effectiveness, ‘market for lemon’ risks with tradable instruments that have measurement, verification or ‘additionality’ difficulties, and the challenges of creating transparent liquid markets for these mechanisms. The mixed performance of these Australian schemes to date illustrates the need for great care in designing such market-based approaches.