Offshore wind is an important contributor to global energy generation, and many countries are running offshore wind farm tenders or are planning to do so. Although interest in new developing new capacity has been cooling recently in the face of higher long-term interest rates and potential supply chain concerns, offshore wind is still expected to grow strongly over the coming years.

We have taken a step back to look at the design of the processes used for allocating offshore wind farm permits. In this paper we discuss two key questions. First, what are the relative merits of running separate tenders for subsidies and access to the seabed? And second, why don’t we see more open auctions in this sector?

Parachute payments – an arrangement under which clubs relegated from the Premier League (PL), for example, continue to share some of the PL’s substantive broadcasting revenues for a few years – have been the source of a long-running disagreement between the PL and the English Football League (EFL). Resolving this dispute will likely be one of the tasks of the forthcoming Independent Football Regulator (IFR).

The IFR is meant to act as an arbitrator, with the final stage (if it comes to it) being a pendulum arbitration process. In this process, the arbitrator can only accept one or the other (or none) of the proposals submitted by the parties but cannot come up with its own compromise solution. This should give both sides an incentive to come up with reasonable suggestions. However, it works well only if the criteria that the arbitrator will use are clear and well understood. We question whether this is the case here given that the IFR’s objectives have been defined in rather vague terms. The IFR will very likely need to clarify these objectives and thus take on a role that goes beyond purely being an arbitrator. See our thoughts here.

The GSMA has declared 2025 to be ‘The Year of Spectrum Renewals’. While licensees understandably argue for an extension or automatic re-assignment, there are good reasons for not dismissing competitive procedures. Benefits from supporting adjustments to spectrum holding suggest using a hybrid approach.

See this paper for more details.

More and more countries are looking at how to grow aquaculture in an environmentally sustainable way. Here’s a brief discussion paper setting out some suggestions on how the licensing process, and the use of auctions for managing licences, can help to control the environmental impact of aquaculture.

The paper is available here.

Fixed links – radio links between two points (point-to-point) or less commonly between one point and several end points (point-to-multipoint) – are crucial inputs in mobile backhaul, fixed wireless access and many other uses. As bandwidth requirements have increased substantially and fibre is not an option everywhere, demand for fixed links and the underlying radio spectrum remains high.

The Irish Telecoms regulator, ComReg, commissioned DotEcon and Axon Partners to review its fixed links licensing framework and recommend adjustments to to support the varied use cases into the future. We developed a simple fee formula that proxies the opportunity costs of each link and made recommendations on available frequency bands, the licensing process and technical conditions. Read more here.

ComReg has published a study by DotEcon (with the support of Analysys Mason) into the resilience of networks and the occurrence of network incidents. It explores the prevalence and impact of connectivity outages using crowd-sourced big data and a large-scale consumer survey, capturing the heterogeneous consumer experiences of network outages.

We measure the relative performance of different platforms and find that diversity in backhaul networks is associated with greater reliability. There is evidence of power laws at work in the likelihood of outages of different scales, with a long tail of high impact events.

Consumers’ unmet demand for reliability would justify an investment of at least €2 billion into improving resilience, similar in scale to the Irish state’s contribution to its National Broadband Plan.