Integrating wind power demands more generation fleet flexibility and incurs more incidences of transmission congestion, which may impose a negative effect on how efficiently regional production is allocated among fossil fuel electricity generators (we call it “regional allocative efficiency”). Exploring exogenous variations in wind power generation conditional on wind turbine capacity, we analyze wind-induced allocative efficiency loss by comparing the average cost sensitivity of fossil-fuel generator utilization between periods of different wind generation levels in a US regional electricity market. Results show that the utilization of fossil fuel generators becomes less sensitive to their costs as the share of wind power increases. This effect is more pronounced when wind power is more volatile and when transmission capacity is less sufficient. The back-of-envelope calculation based on our empirical findings suggests that the private inefficiency cost is nontrivial: taking it into account would increase the levelized cost of wind energy by $12/MWh, amounting to approximately 17% of the traditional estimates. Further incorporating the social damage of carbon dioxide in the calculation implies that the privately inefficient substitution from cheap coal to expensive gas units instead brings a net social benefit; nonetheless, our estimated private cost is still policy-relevant since it is a local burden while the carbon abatement benefit is shared globally.

整合风电需要更大的发电量灵活性，并导致更多的输电拥堵发生，这可能会对化石燃料发电商之间的区域生产分配效率（我们称之为“区域配置效率”）产生负面影响。为了探索以风力涡轮机容量为条件的风力发电的外生变化，我们通过比较美国区域电力市场中不同风力发电水平期间化石燃料发电机利用的平均成本敏感性来分析风引起的配置效率损失。结果表明，随着风电份额的增加，化石燃料发电机的利用对其成本的敏感度降低。当风电波动较大且输电容量不够充足时，这种影响更为明显。基于我们的实证研究结果的粗略计算表明，私人低效率成本并非微不足道：将其考虑在内将使风能的平准化成本增加 12 美元/兆瓦时，相当于传统估计的约 17%。在计算中进一步纳入二氧化碳的社会损害意味着，从廉价煤炭到昂贵天然气单位的私人低效替代反而会带来净社会效益；尽管如此，我们估计的私人成本仍然与政策相关，因为它是当地的负担，而碳减排效益是全球共享的。