Conference Agenda

Despite the growing frequency of power outages in the context of climate change, little is known about the underlying causes of grid instability. In this study, we document and quantify previously overlooked factors contributing to unplanned electricity outages: upstream water temperature and water height. Using high-frequency data from utility outage reports and a novel instrumental variable—upstream water flow—we establish that both water temperature and water height significantly affect the likelihood of unplanned outages at the plant unit level. Moreover, we demonstrate that these effects are non-linear. Specifically, the probability of an outage exceeds 50% when upstream water temperature reaches 25°C, while for water height, the outage probability peaks at 50 cm and diminishes as water height increases. These effects are predominantly driven by older power plants, suggesting that the age and resilience of the plant infrastructure play a critical role in its vulnerability to hydrological conditions. Those results may be relevant not only for coal power plants but also nuclear plants.

Rising temperatures and increasing hydrological stress pose growing challenges for electricity systems that rely on water-cooled thermal generation. This paper studies how climatic conditions and environmental regulation jointly constrain the short-run operation of nuclear power plants, using the French nuclear fleet as a laboratory. We assemble a novel plant-level panel combining hourly electricity generation, detailed outage information, and local hydrological and meteorological conditions over the period 2012–2024. Exploiting high-frequency variation in the timing of environmentally induced unavailability events, we estimate their causal impact on electricity production using a stacked difference-in-differences event-study design. Environmental constraints lead to immediate and sizable reductions in nuclear output: on average, production falls by about 285 MWh per hour, corresponding to nearly 30% of installed capacity. These effects are highly persistent over the duration of the event and exhibit no evidence of anticipatory behavior. The impacts are larger for higher-capacity reactors and for plants operating under more stringent cooling regulations. We further address potential measurement error in outage classification by reclassifying forced unavailability events based on observed climatic and hydrological conditions. Using this extended definition, estimated production losses increase to roughly 360 MWh per hour, indicating that baseline estimates are conservative. Overall, the results show that environmental regulation transforms climatic stress into discrete and economically meaningful supply shocks in low-carbon electricity systems. As climate change intensifies heat and water scarcity, these regulatory–physical interactions are likely to play an increasingly important role in shaping power system reliability and adaptation.

Disruptions in water supply have become more frequent due to increased demands and drought risk. However, evidence is limited on how within-city reliability shocks interact with increasing-block tariffs (IBTs) and the rising use of decentralized self-supply through private wells in developing countries. We quantify the responses of network demand and private-well adoption to supply-failure exposure under an IBT, controlling for housing type and socioeconomic characteristics, to observe how housing form mediates adaptation and impacts equity and utility revenue. We assembled a novel georeferenced micro-database for a drought-prone city in São Paulo (Brazil), linking 148,000 residential connections with housing typologies, through 2022 census microdata. Single-family houses, prohibited from using private wells when connected to the public network under Brazilian regulations, have the lowest average income and per-capita water consumption compared to apartments and gated multi-house complexes. Using 2021-2023 monthly billing panels, we estimate demand models with census-tract and month-year fixed effects and lagged average prices, mitigating price-quantity simultaneity. Demand is price-inelastic but responsive (elasticity of -0.35) and displays a steep income gradient: elasticities are around -0.6 for low-income groups and become indistinguishable from zero in higher-income settings. Households in areas with disruptions are also more price responsive, particularly among lower-income groups. We then model self-supply with logit specifications for well access and supply regimes. Exposure to supply failures is the dominant predictor of well use, multiplying adoption odds by 3.7-5.2. The results reveal an adverse selection issue: the settings able to coordinate collective well use are also higher-demand customers facing higher prices under the IBT, weakening conservation incentives and cross-subsidies while shifting coping costs toward households with fewer supply alternatives. The findings underscore the need to jointly design reliability investments, tariff structures, and groundwater self-supply management instruments to protect utility cost recovery and equity in water-stressed cities.