Electricity market regulations and their impact on distributed generation

Distributed generation (DG) has attracted a lot of attention recently and might become more important in future power generation systems. As different definitions are used worldwide, the paper briefly discusses the definition of DG. The future development of DG, however, will, to a not insignificant part, depend on the legal framework. As the legal framework can vary significantly for different competitive electricity markets, this paper briefly identifies and analyses some variations in the regulatory approaches, e.g. for power exchanges, balance services and ancillary services, in different countries. It also illustrates the influence of market regulations on the development of distributed power generation. Based on this analysis, it can be concluded that regulatory aspects might decisively influence the development of distributed power generation.