Entwicklung eines Anreizsystems für die Marktintegration und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von ökologisch nachhaltigen Energien im österreichischen Strommarkt

This dissertation explores a new incentive system for the market integration and competitiveness of environmentally sustainable energies in the Austrian electricity market. The focus technologies are: run-of-river power-, photovoltaic-, wind power-, biomass- and biogas plants to be newly built by power generation companies as full feed plants with a corresponding capacity classification. The analysis and critical examination of the research showed that the located incentive instruments trigger distortions in the electricity markets, complicate the required system integration and cause lock-in effects. Another insight gained from the document analysis is the lack of consideration of interdependencies between incentive and internalization instruments, which are mandatory for an efficient allocation policy.

To achieve the research objective, a qualitative-inductive and a quantitative-deductive sub-study were undertaken for a theory-based hypothesis testing. In the first part of the mixed-methods research approach, the grounded theory methodology was used to explore an object-based theory based on data from guideline-based expert interviews. Within the framework of open, axial and selective coding based on the coding paradigm, two theory parts were explored with the market- and system-oriented incentive theory and the internalization theory. Together with the intervening conditions, the two theory parts form the incentive system MIS2CPG, meaning: market-integrated incentive system for sustainable competitive power generation. The incentive theory is based on the innovative approach of achieving the economic viability of the focus technologies via a technology-specific, hourly-based and dynamic compensation tariff, which is calculated from the day-ahead prices, the electricity production costs and an operator-specific compensation indicator. In the second part of the mixed-methods research approach, the quantitative investigation, the theory was empirically examined by means of an econometric model using the hypothetical-deductive method, which is a proven approach in business administration. The result confirms the accurate effect of the compensation mechanism in terms of ensuring the competitiveness or economic viability of the focus technologies so that the dissertation with the researched incentive system MIS2CPG makes a significant contribution to business management research in the field of energy economics in conjunction with environmental economics.