L'électricité est-elle un bien public?

Wholesale electricity markets are increasingly driven by the rules of competition while recent outages in different regions of the world suggest that security of supply is a public good. The objective of this paper is to show that security of supply and more generally, electricity supply has both public and private characteristics. Whilst the public good characteristic explains why some producers may prefer to free ride on others' investments to maintain reliability, the private good aspect of reliability shows that agents may have a variety of preferences for reliability. Then by relying on the concept of Pareto-relevant externality, the paper explores the private aspect of reliability for the prospect of creating and selling reliability as a differentiated product complementary to bulk power markets. Finally, policy recommendations are derived that aim to enhance information content in the network. JEL codes: H41, L94, L98.