Elihu Thomson was a major American inventor of electric light and power systems. A contemporary of Thomas Edison, Thomson performed the engineering and design work necessary to make electric lighting a common product. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Thomson was employed by the General Electric Company and its predecessors. Working within the corporation, Thomson reveals how successful inventions are based on explicit links among technological artifacts, marketing strategy, and the business organization needed for manufacturing and marketing.

This book offers the most comprehensive characterization assembled to date of the historical, institutional, and economic forces affecting electricity regulation. Eminent economists organized by the University of California Energy Institute survey the US, UK, Scandinavia, Latin America, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and Yugoslavia. Recent experiments with privatization, competition, and restructuring in electricity are contrasted with instances where government ownership and traditional vertical integration still dominate. The introductory essay by Richard J. Gilbert, Edward P. Kahn, and David Newbery synthesizes individual country studies.

Elihu Thomson was a late-nineteenth-century American inventor who helped create the first electric lighting and power systems. One of the most prolific inventors in American history, Thomson was granted nearly 700 patents in a career spanning the 1880s to 1930s. His inventions included arc and incandescent lighting systems, alternating current motors and transformers, electric welding equipment, and the recording watt-meter, all of which were central in determining how electricity is used today. Thomson was educated in science, and he used a combination of scientific values and craft skills to develop his many inventions. Consequently, his career permits an investigation of how technologists employ craft knowledge to create new products. While employed by the General Electric Company, Thomson worked with other managers and entrepreneurs to link the hardware of electric lighting with business organization and marketing strategy. Thus, his story also traces the role of technology in the rise of a major American corporation.

Two general questions stood at the beginning of this PhD-thesis, namely: * What are the mechanisms which lead to the emergence and establishment of new technologies? * How can this process of technological change be influenced politically? In this sense, conceptual and theoretical interests were the early driving forces of the research work. This is also reflected in the considerable attention paid to the nature of technological change and political control. The result is an holistic per spective which builds on inputs from different disciplines and aims at dynamic interpretation. This, however, created a severe methodological problem: How could such a comprehensive perspective be used constructively? To develop this link between theory and forward-looking, policy-oriented analysis, and to devise a methodology which showed explicitly how this approach could be used in a con structive way were in fact the major challenges of this research project. The appli cation to the example of combined heat and power generation, and the comparison of the developments in the UK and in Germany serve the purpose to demonstrate how this approach and methodology can be implemented in practice. These as pects were also of particular interest to the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), one ofthe institutes of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, where most of the research work reported in this PhD-thesis was carried out.

1.1 Economic issues to be analyzed This research examines two elements of the Swiss market for electricity: the residential electricity demand by time-of-use and the cost structure of municipal electricity distribution utilities. The empirical results of demand and cost elasticities allow the investigation of interesting economic and policy issues such as the desirability of a widespread introduction of time-of-use pricing for residential customers, the desirability of side-by-side competition in the distribution of electricity and, more generally, the economic effects of a reduction of the load factor and of mergers between electric distribution utilities on costs. Desirability of time-of-use pricing In the last decade there has been an intensifying debate in Switzerland about efficacy of electricity rate reforms in order to improve the efficiency of electricity use. This debate was initiated by two main events. First, there was an important growth of electricity consumption. Second, the Chernobyl accident in 1986 aroused widespread public concern about the problems associated with nuclear power and waste disposal. As a result, in 1991 the Swiss voted, in a referendum, a lO-year moratorium on the 2 construction of new nuclear power plants. Moreover, plans to expand production of hydroelectric power (construction of new dams or expanding existing ones) have been stiffly opposed by environmental groups. These developments have consistently curtailed potential expansion of domestic electricity supply. As a result, Switzerland during the winter has to import electricity from foreign countries.

For most of us, life is spent in one vast electromagnetic field. In the office we sit in front of computer terminals, at home, in front of the television. We cook our meals in microwave ovens, trim our hedges with electric shears, illuminate our houses, workplaces, and streets with incandescent and fluorescent lighting. And until only recently, the potential hazards imposed by life in the shadows of high-voltage power lines have hardly been considered. First published in 1973, Power Over People was the first book to address the frightening potential side effects of our dependence on electrical energy. Now brought up to date with a new introduction, and including an epilogue that offers the most current studies and findings available today, this classic book is more timely than ever. Louise Young here lays bare the short-sighted, materialistic policies of the electric power industry, showing how power and the conglomerates that produce it have clearly won out over rights and safety concerns of people. She provides disturbing documentary evidence that demonstrates how long-term exposure to radiation from power lines can cause brain cancer, childhood leukemia, as well as damage to the nervous system. Through the course of the book we come to understand that what is often blindly accepted as "progress" can mean the inexorable advance of environmental destruction and the withering-rather than enhancing-of the quality of life in America. Based on a case-study of a small, rural community in Ohio, Young shows in compelling fashion what happens when a grass-roots group of concerned citizens resists the construction of the world's largest electrical transmission towers, literally in their own backyards. Her story of their ultimate failure becomes a stinging indictment of indifferent government agencies and the lax laws that fail to protect the environment. Lively, readable, and, at times, even shocking, this is a book for environmentally-minded and safety-conscious readers of the 1990s. Its wealth of information, its incisive analysis, and its bold confrontation of facts we can no longer afford to ignore make Power Over People a book everyone should read and reflect upon.

Power system operation is one of the important issues in the power industry. The book aims to provide readers with the methods and algorithms to save the total cost in electricity generation and transmission. It begins with traditional power systems and builds into the fundamentals of power system operation, economic dispatch (ED), optimal power flow (OPF), and unit commitment (UC). The book covers electricity pricing mechanisms, such as nodal pricing and zonal pricing, based on Security-Constrained ED (SCED) or SCUC. The operation of energy market and ancillary service market are also explored. "It covers a wide range of interesting topics, which could be very useful for understanding the main phenomena ruling power systems economy (such as Optimal Power Flow analysis and unit Commitments). It addresses topics widely treated in the literature, hence it is important to outline its distinctive features compared to other similar books. The book is well structured and well balanced." -Alfredo Vaccaro, University of Sannio, Italy

Ever since Schumpeter's groundbreaking work there has been a plethora of new research seeking to extend the direction and dynamics of innovation. Using a rich account of detailed interviews, this book offers new evidence on how latecomers have successfully caught up and leapfrogged incumbent firms. Catching Up and Leapfrogging: the new latecomers in the integrated circuits industry explores how technological transitions affect latecomer catch-up strategies, and vice versa, in a high technology industry. It looks to the East Asian latecomers who, towards the end of the twentieth century, pioneered a new pathway through organizational change by specializing in the key production stages of integrated circuits and pushing technologies further. This volume assesses how latecomer resource acquisition strategies have varied alongside structural industry changes and evaluates the mechanisms through which firms started life as technology followers and rose to become technology leaders. Xiao-Shan Yap and Rajah Rasiah present a unique story about how firm strategies evolve from the catching up phase to the leapfrogging phase, captured from the accounts of managers on the ground. It is the first time firm-level strategies have been systematically analysed to describe twenty-first century strategic management in the integrated circuits industry in particular, and the high tech industry in general. The evidence and analysis in this book offers insights for chief executive officers, policy-makers and researchers to revisit existing approaches to the theory of catching up and leapfrogging.

The meteoric rise of the photovoltaic (PV) industry is an incredible story. In 2013, Google s investments in PV systems totaled about half a billion dollars and Warren Buffet, one of the famous investors, invested $2.5 billion in the world s largest PV system in California. These gigantic investments by major financial players were made only 40 years after the first two terrestrial PV companies, Solarex and Solar Power Corporation, were formed in the USA. Back in 1973, the two companies employed 20 people and produced only 500 watts of PV power. Now, just 40 years later, over a million people work in the PV industry. The worldwide capacity of operating PV electric generators equals the capacity of about 25 nuclear power plants. The PV industry is growing at an annual rate of 30 percent, equivalent to about five new nuclear power plants per year. Today, solar electricity is a significant supplier of electricity needs, to the extent that PV is forcing the restructuring of 100-year-old electric power utilities. This book describes how this happened and what lies ahead for PV power generation."

The integration of renewable energy resources into the electricity grid presents an important challenge. This book provides a review and analysis of the technical and policy options available for managing variable energy resources such as wind and solar power. As well as being of value to government and industry policy-makers and planners, the volume also provides a single source for scientists and engineers of the technical knowledge gained during the 4-year RenewElec (renewable electricity) project at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Vermont, Vermont Law School, and the Van Ness Feldman environmental law firm. The first part of the book discusses the options for large scale integration of variable electric power generation, including issues of predictability, variability, and efficiency. The second part presents the scientific findings of the project. In the final part, the authors undertake a critical review of major quantitative regional and national wind integration studies in the United States. Based on comparisons among these studies, they suggest areas where improvements in methods are warranted in future studies, areas where additional research is needed to facilitate future improvements in wind integration studies and how the research can be put into practice.

This biography charts the life of Paddy Moriarty, the Kerryborn Chief Executive of ESB, a man who revolutionized corporate life during his leadership of the largest semi-state company in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Dingle in 1926, he became one of Ireland's leading business people of the twentieth century as he transformed ESB into a world-class electricity provider and a highly efficient, commercially driven company. Having built the power infrastructure of the new State, ESB played a critical role in the revitalization of the Irish economy and, on Moriarty's watch, proceeded to assist in developing the foundations of the Celtic Tiger economy. His vision was to make ESB 'the best electricity utility in the whole world', developing the highest standards of infrastructure at home while developing an international business in the economies of North and Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Moriarty joined ESB as a clerical officer in June 1945 at the age of nineteen and quickly gained a reputation as a young man with a determined view on how business should be run. He rose rapidly through the company ranks. He was head of Research and Audit in 1961, Assistant Chief Financial Officer in 1967 and Director Personnel in 1970, before becoming Chief Executive in 1981 and Chairman ESB in 1991. The man they called Paddy Mo conducted comprehensive and difficult industrial relations negotiations with the trade unions, ensuring harmony in the workplace during the 1980s - a decade of fast-moving change, massive technological reform and associated redundancies. His interpersonal skills, as well as his business instincts, became legendary. With Taoiseach Charles Haughey he helped pioneer the North-South Erne Waterways project in a bid to revitalize border communities. He was also a significant patron of the arts, encouraging sponsorship of painters, sculptors and musicians. His wide-ranging interests included sports and horse racing, with one of the Leopardstown classics being named in his honour. A sense of family, which included his younger brother Micheal O Muircheartaigh the renowned GAA broadcaster and commentator, was central to his world view.

An essential overview of post-deregulation market operations in electrical power systems

Until recently the U.S. electricity industry was dominated by vertically integrated utilities. It is now evolving into a distributive and competitive market driven by market forces and increased competition. With electricity amounting to a $200 billion per year market in the United States, the implications of this restructuring will naturally affect the rest of the world.

Why is restructuring necessary? What are the components of restructuring? How is the new structure different from the old monopoly? How are the participants strategizing their options to maximize their revenues? What are the market risks and how are they evaluated? How are interchange transactions analyzed and approved? Starting with a background sketch of the industry, this hands-on reference provides insights into the new trends in power systems operation and control, and highlights advanced issues in the field.

Written for both technical and nontechnical professionals involved in power engineering, finance, and marketing, this must-have resource discusses:

• Market structure and operation of electric power systems
• Load and price forecasting and arbitrage
• Price-based unit commitment and security constrained unit commitment
• Market power analysis and game theory applications
• Ancillary services auction market design
• Transmission pricing and congestion

Using real-world case studies, this timely survey offers engineers, consultants, researchers, financial managers, university professors and students, and other professionals in the industry a comprehensive review of electricity restructuring and how its radical effects will shape the market.

In 1998 the South African government was warned that the country was running out of electricity. Despite the warnings, the decision was taken not to invest in new power stations. Had the warnings been heeded, South Africa could have had a new power station up and running by 2006 and load shedding may never have happened. Instead, in 2007, as predicted, South Africa ran out of electricity.

Eight years later, the crisis has deepened and despite assurances to the contrary by government leadership, it has the potential to become the biggest post-apartheid crisis in South Africa. By 2015 load shedding cost the South African economy an estimated R2 billion per day.

Is the situation getting better or worse? Are the interventions working or is a blackout inevitable? What can be done and what do future scenarios look like?

Blackout: The Eskom Crisis provides a look at what’s happening to one of the greatest power utilities in the world, the greatest on the African continent. It deals with everything from load shedding to blackouts and unpacks the issues raging around candlelight dinners in households across South Africa today.

As the electric power industry faces the challenges of climate change, technological disruption, new market imperatives, and changing policies, a renowned energy expert offers a roadmap to the future of this essential sector. As the damaging and costly impacts of climate change increase, the rapid development of sustainable energy has taken on great urgency. The electricity industry has responded with necessary but wrenching shifts toward renewables, even as it faces unprecedented challenges and disruption brought on by new technologies, new competitors, and policy changes. The result is a collision course between a grid that must provide abundant, secure, flexible, and affordable power, and an industry facing enormous demands for power and rapid, systemic change. The fashionable solution is to think small: smart buildings, small-scale renewables, and locally distributed green energy. But Peter Fox-Penner makes clear that these will not be enough to meet our increasing needs for electricity. He points instead to the indispensability of large power systems, battery storage, and scalable carbon-free power technologies, along with the grids and markets that will integrate them. The electric power industry and its regulators will have to provide all of these, even as they grapple with changing business models for local electric utilities, political instability, and technological change. Power after Carbon makes sense of all the moving parts, providing actionable recommendations for anyone involved with or relying on the electric power system.

What will electricity and heat demand look like in a low-carbon world? Ambitious environmental targets will modify the shape of the electricity sector in the twenty-first century. 'Smart' technologies and demand-side management will be some of the key features of the future of electricity systems in a low-carbon world. Meanwhile, the social and behavioural dimensions will complement and interact with new technologies and policies. Electricity demand in the future will increasingly be tied up with the demand for heat and for transport. The Future of Electricity Demand looks into the features of the future electricity demand in light of the challenges posed by climate change. Written by a team of leading academics and industry experts, the book investigates the economics, technology, social aspects, and policies and regulations which are likely to characterize energy demand in a low-carbon world. It provides a comprehensive and analytical perspective on the future of electricity demand.

The electric utility industry in the US is technologically complex, and its structure as a classic network industry makes it intricate in business terms as well, so deregulation of such a complicated industry was a particularly detailed process. Steve Isser provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the history of the transformation of this complex industry from the 1978 Energy Policy Act to the present, covering the economic, legal, regulatory, and political issues and controversies in the transition from regulated utilities to competitive electricity markets. The book is a multidisciplinary study that includes a comprehensive review of the economic literature on electricity markets, the political environment of electricity policymaking, administrative and regulatory rulemaking, and the federal case law that restrained state and federal regulation of electricity. Isser offers a valuable case study of the pitfalls and problems associated with the deregulation of a complex network industry.

Meeting targets aimed at tackling the climate change challenge requires moving towards a low-carbon economy. These targets can only be met with major reductions in carbon emissions from the electricity sector. Written by a team of leading academics and industry experts, Delivering a Low Carbon Electricity System analyses the social, technological, economic and political issues that affect the attempt to create a low-carbon electricity sector and assesses the main instruments for achieving this aim. The book begins by looking at how low-carbon generation technologies might be added in sufficient quantity to the electricity system. Next, it examines how networks and the demand side can help to decarbonise the sector. It then highlights the role of innovation and discusses instruments for promoting technological progress. Finally, given the economic framework and technological possibilities, it presents a number of general and specific policy instruments and options for the future.

This book examines how multinational enterprises and international finance influenced the course of electrification around the world. Multinational enterprises played a crucial role in the spread of electric light and power from the 1870s through the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, their role did not persist, and by 1978 multinational enterprises in this sector had all but disappeared, replaced by electrical utility providers with national business structures. Yet, in recent years, there has been a vigorous revival. This book, a co-operative effort by the three authors and a group of experts from many countries, offers an analysis of the history of multinational enterprise. The authors take an integrated approach, not simply comparing national electrification experiences, but supplying a truly global account.

The Chinese electricity sector is the largest in the world, covering well over 20% of the world's electricity supply. While many other countries liberalized their electricity systems in the 1990s, thereby creating competitive wholesale and retail electricity markets, China's move towards liberalization has advanced at a slower pace - until now. Following the China State Council's publication of the No. 9 document on 'Deepening Reform of the Power Sector', this book reflects on the ambitious new round of reforms aimed at introducing competitive wholesale electricity markets and incentive regulation for its power grids. Written in collaboration with Hao Chen, Lewis Dale and Chung-Han Yang, this book provides lessons for China's reforms from international experience, combining a detailed review of reforms from around the world with specific application to China and focuses on how the industrial price of electricity is determined in a liberalized power system.

Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogenous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life. Canay OEzden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.

After decades of stability, power systems are currently undergoing a rapid transition - demand patterns are evolving, while supply sources are shifting to renewable energies at an accelerated pace. This book, written by an experienced energy professional, combines the various aspects of supply and demand developments to offer a unified perspective. It highlights the key changes that the world of electric utilities and power systems will face in the coming decade, as well as the major challenges that will emerge as a result. Supplemented by a wealth of global and local data, the book describes the major patterns that affect both supply and demand, and provides a quantified analysis of their impacts on power system grids and markets. Lastly, it explores the new technologies that can enable the success of these transformations.

This book consolidates some of the most promising advanced smart grid functionalities and provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for their implementation/evaluation using DIgSILENT Power Factory. It includes specific aspects of modeling, simulation and analysis, for example wide-area monitoring, visualization and control, dynamic capability rating, real-time load measurement and management, interfaces and co-simulation for modeling and simulation of hybrid systems. It also presents key advanced features of modeling and automation of calculations using PowerFactory, such as the use of domain-specific (DSL) and DIgSILENT Programming (DPL) languages, and utilizes a variety of methodologies including theoretical explanations, practical examples and guidelines. Providing a concise compilation of significant outcomes by experienced users and developers of this program, it is a valuable resource for postgraduate students and engineers working in power-system operation and planning.

This book addresses the vector control of three-phase AC machines, in particular induction motors with squirrel-cage rotors (IM), permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM) and doubly-fed induction machines (DFIM), from a practical design and development perspective. The main focus is on the application of IM and PMSM in electrical drive systems, where field-orientated control has been successfully established in practice. It also discusses the use of grid-voltage oriented control of DFIMs in wind power plants. This second, enlarged edition includes new insights into flatness-based nonlinear control of IM, PMSM and DFIM. The book is useful for practitioners as well as development engineers and designers in the area of electrical drives and wind-power technology. It is a valuable resource for researchers and students.

Shabnam Mirsaeedi-Farahani analyzes Iran's interests in diversifying its energy sector, specifically electricity generation and consumption, between 1990 and 2011. She examines the policy discussions in the Iranian Parliament as well as policy development and implementation with respect to the electricity sector. One of the geopolitically crucial areas for both Iran's domestic development as well as its international influence has been its energy sector. The author assesses international policy pressures and domestic interests to evaluate the interplay of interests, actors, and strategies. While increasing domestic generation capacity, Iran has been able to further its regional interests and influences as well as to build a backbone for its industrialization endeavors.

This book aims to make the best use of fine-grained smart meter data to process and translate them into actual information and incorporated into consumer behavior modeling and distribution system operations. It begins with an overview of recent developments in smart meter data analytics. Since data management is the basis of further smart meter data analytics and its applications, three issues on data management, i.e., data compression, anomaly detection, and data generation, are subsequently studied. The following works try to model complex consumer behavior. Specific works include load profiling, pattern recognition, personalized price design, socio-demographic information identification, and household behavior coding. On this basis, the book extends consumer behavior in spatial and temporal scale. Works such as consumer aggregation, individual load forecasting, and aggregated load forecasting are introduced. We hope this book can inspire readers to define new problems, apply novel methods, and obtain interesting results with massive smart meter data or even other monitoring data in the power systems.