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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Energy industries & utilities > Electrical power industries
While billions have been provided to rebuild Iraq's oil and electricity sectors, Iraq's future needs are significant and sources of funding uncertain. For fiscal years 2003 through 2006, the United States made available about $7.4 billion and spent about $5.1 billion to rebuild the oil and electricity sectors. The United States spent an additional $3.8 billion in Iraqi funds on the two sectors, primarily on oil and electricity sector contracts administered by U.S. agencies. However, according to various estimates and officials, Iraq will need billions of additional dollars to rebuild, maintain, and secure Iraq's oil and electricity sectors. The Ministry of Electricity estimates that about $27 billion will be needed to meet the sector's future rebuilding requirements; a comparable estimate has not been developed by the Ministry of Oil. Since the majority (about 70 percent) of U.S. funds has been spent, the Iraqi government and the international donor community represent important sources of potential funding. However, prospects of such funding are uncertain. First, the Oil and Electricity Ministries have encountered difficulties spending capital improvement budgets because of weaknesses in budgeting, procurement, and financial management. As of November 2006, the Ministry of Oil had spent less than 3 percent of its $3.5 billion 2006 capital budget to improve Iraq's oil facilities. Second, Iraq has not made full use of potential international contributions and it is unclear what additional financial commitments, if any, will be provided to Iraq's oil and electricity sectors as part of a new international compact (agreement), according to U.S. officials. As of March 2007, donors had committed $580 million in grants for the electricity sector and had offered loans for oil and electricity projects; however, Iraq has not accessed these loans in part due to concerns about its high debt burden.
This book is a comprehensive, clear, and well-organized description of applied quality regulation in the electricity sector as it is today. It creates an essential bridge linking the theoretical aspects of service quality regulation with country-specific applied mechanisms. As a special feature, the book offers a survey of the most innovative regulatory mechanisms under proposal, in test stages, or in effect in European countries.
This book attempts to explain what went wrong in California's restructured energy markets and what must be done to restore California's economy and build new electricity systems. The intention here is to reconcile the principles of competition and regulation. California had a severe electricity crisis for about thirteen months beginning in May of 2000. The economic consequences and political fallout that arose from this crisis persist. California's economy continues to suffer and the state's treasury is deeply in debt. The state's three investor-owned utilities were nearly financially decimated. San Diego Gas & Electric has recovered to a greater degree than the other two only because its retail prices are about three times the national average and, for a time, well above the other two IOUs in California. Southern California Edison has recently been restored to investment grade and was granted a rate increase. Pacific Gas & Electric is emerging from bankruptcy. This book discusses all of this in greater detail. The problems and consequences arising from California's ill-fated foray into electricity market restructuring could damage the state for years to come. Challenges of this nature are not new to the Golden State. In the past, as we explain here, pragmatic, not entrenched, approaches have worked best in California. If California is to relatively quickly restore its previous enviable economic vitality and recover from the damage done to tarnish its luster, pragmatic approaches must again be used.
Published in association with Institute for Development and Communication, ChandigarhA comprehensive review of the technical performance of the Punjab State Electricity Board and erstwhile Haryana State Electricity Board has been conducted to identify the key factors responsible for poor technical and financial performance. It has been observed that no reforms in power sector in general and of power distribution in particular will be successful unless the problem of theft and pilferage of power is tackled. To identify the dynamics of this ailment, a survey based study, of perceptions of the consumers and the employees regarding the theft and pilferage of power shows that the evil has got highly institutionalized and has acquired a social acceptability and legitimacy among consumers as well as employees. Pilferage of power is not just a technical problem; hence simple technical solutions will not be adequate. Passing of laws by itself does not ensure their enforcement. The attitude of the people towards publicly provided goods evolved over the last five decades needs a change for which social marketing strategies need to be evolved as necessary complement to the appropriate type of restructuring of the state electricity boards. Based on firm data and rigorous analysis, this book makes a case for suitable institutional interventions.
Transport Pricing of Electricity Networks aims at providing a
methodological and practical transmission tariff guide, to those
who are involved in the electricity business as managers,
engineers, lawyers, economists, regulators or policy-makers, but
are not specialists in electricity transport, nor in tariff-setting
for public utilities. It offers a synthesis of the recent economic
research on the subject. The volume is divided into three major
parts, each presenting a general aspect of transmission pricing:
its legal and accounting background, its basic theory, and its
implementation, successively.
Electricity Pricing In Transition is written to address the new issues facing utilities, retailers, regulators, and customers in the changing electricity market. It is organized into five sections. Section I deals with the new restructured organization that has emerged from yesterday's vertically integrated, regulated monopoly company. Section II deals with issues in competitive pricing. Section III reviews the role of demand response and product design in today's chaotic marketplace. Given the single importance of California's energy crisis and the fact that it will be studied for years to come, Section IV is devoted to studying the lessons learned from this crisis. The final section of the book deals with markets and regulations. This book will provide practitioners with guidance on how to avoid the major pitfalls in pricing electricity while the market is in transition by drawing upon the insights and lessons learned from the experience of others that are documented in this book.
This guidebook for managers and other decision makers analyses all important aspects that have to be considered when evaluating photovoltaics as a potential option in the power-supply industry and industrial development. Since such an analysis is quite complex and requires know-how from several scientific disciplines, the book draws upon the expertise of about 40 invited experts. Consensus statements on some of the controversial items such as cost development or energy pay-back time are given. In addition, the book is rounded out by an evaluation of the technological status of photovoltaics. The Photovoltaics Guidebook for Decision Makers enables readers to form their own opinions, particularly on the realistic potential and role of photovoltaics in energy policy, the power-supply industry and industrial development.
Over the years, the electric power industry has been using optimization methods to help them solve the unit commitment problem. The result has been savings of tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel costs. Things are changing, however. Optimization technology is improving, and the industry is undergoing radical restructuring. Consequently, the role of commitment models is changing, and the value of the improved solutions that better algorithms might yield is increasing. The dual purpose of this book is to explore the technology and needs of the next generation of computer models for aiding unit commitment decisions. Because of the unit commitment problem's size and complexity and because of the large economic benefits that could result from its improved solution, considerable attention has been devoted to algorithm development in the book. More systematic procedures based on a variety of widely researched algorithms have been proposed and tested. These techniques have included dynamic programming, branch-and-bound mixed integer programming (MIP), linear and network programming approaches, and Benders decomposition methods, among others. Recently, metaheuristic methods have been tested, such as genetic programming and simulated annealing, along with expert systems and neural networks. Because electric markets are changing rapidly, how UC models are solved and what purposes they serve need reconsideration. Hence, the book brings together people who understand the problem and people who know what improvements in algorithms are really possible. The two-fold result in The Next Generation of Electric Power Unit Commitment Models is an assessment of industry needs and new formulations and computational approaches that promise to make unit commitment models more responsive to those needs.
Electricity markets world-wide are undergoing a transformation, as state-owned and vertically integrated monopolies are being replaced by competitive dynamics and private participation. Policy reforms driving this transformation include the corporatization and restructuring of state-owned utilities; the unbundling of generation, transmission, and distribution; the creation of independent regulators; and the promotion of private sector involvement in investment and management. This study reviews international reform trends and best practice in sector policy, with specific reference to Latin America. It documents how regulatory reform, privatization, and cross-border integration are unfolding throughout the European Single Market, triggered by EU legislation. This study also shows that sector performance and sector reforms in the southern Mediterranean countries are lagging considerably behind international trends. Finally, it argues that a number of reform initiatives at the national and regional level should be taken to promote policy reforms and cross-border integration in this sector. This would help the countries of North Africa and the Middle East to increase economic efficiency, consolidate public finances, attract foreign direct investment, and to more effectively 'plug into' the European Single Market on the northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
The challenges facing participants in competitive electricity markets are staggering: high price volatility introduces significant financial risk into an industry accustomed to guaranteed rates of return, while illiquid forward markets prevent effective hedging strategies from being implemented. Valuation, Hedging and Speculation in Competitive Electricity Markets: A Fundamental Approach, examines the unique properties which separate electricity from other traded commodities, including the lack of economical storage, and the impact of a scarce transmission network. The authors trace the sources of uncertainties in the price of electricity to underlying physical and economic processes, and incorporate these into a bid-based model for electricity spot and forward prices. They also illustrate how insufficient market data can be circumvented by using a combination of price and load data in the marking- to-market process. The model is applied to three classes of problems central to the operation of any electric utility or power marketer; valuing generation assets, formulating dynamic hedging strategies for load serving obligations, and pricing transmission contracts and locational spread options. Emphasis is placed on the difference between trades which can be 'booked out' in the forward markets, and those which must be carried through to delivery. Lately, significant attention has been given to the role of regulators in mitigating excessive price levels in electricity markets. The authors conduct a quantitative analysis of the long-term effects of regulatory intervention through the use of price caps. By modeling the dynamic interplay between the observed price levels and the decision toinvest in new generation assets, it is shown how such short term fixes can lead to long term deficits in the available generation capacity, and ultimately to market failures and blackouts.
Electricity markets are being deregulated or face new regulatory frameworks. In such changing markets, new pricing strategies will need to consider such factors as cost, value of service and pricing by objective. Pricing in Competitive Electricity Markets introduces a new family of pricing concepts, methodologies, models, tools and databases focused on market-based pricing. This book reviews important theoretical pricing issues as well as practical pricing applications for changing electricity markets.
Norwegian deregulation was, together with the British model, a pioneer forerunner in the restructuring of European electricity industry. The Norwegian model, unlike the British, did not change ownership or structure, but relied heavily on a radical opening of the market way down to household consumers. It also developed a more advanced pool system based on actual bidding both on the supply and demand side, as well as triggering the first regional integrated competitive power market in the world. This book draws on a wide range of applied research and gives a summary of the Norwegian experience.
With major structural changes will need to be thoroughly reexamined. This book discusses decision making for problems where a particular decision affects the options available at the next decision time. The deregulation of the electric utility industry will shift the emphasis from a cost-based to a price-based approach; the resulting occuring in the electric power industry, many long-standing ways of operation increase in uncertainty requires that a stochastic approach be adopted for optimal decision-making. This monograph covers a wide range of topics including dynamic programming, ordinal optimization, price modelling and forecasting, future market decisions, reserve market decisions and decisions in a congested market place.
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.
`Electric energy must be treated as a commodity which can be bought, sold, and traded, taking into account its time- and space-varying values and costs.` Spot Pricing of Electricity, Schweppe et al, 1988. Computational Auction Mechanisms for Restructured Power Industry Operation outlines the application of auction methods for all aspects of power system operation, primarily for a competitive environment. A complete description of the industry structure as well as the various markets now being formed is given. A thorough introduction to auction basics is included to explain how auctions have grown in other industries. Auction methods are compared to classical techniques for power system analysis, operations, and planning. The traditional applications of economic dispatch, optimal power flow and unit commitment are compared to auction mechanisms. Algorithms for auctions using linearized power flow equations, DC power flow equations, and AC power flow equations are included. The bundling of supportive services, known as ancillary services within the United States, is discussed. Extensions to the basic auction algorithms for inclusion of supportive services as well as algorithms for scheduling and bidding on generation for GENCOs or independent power producers are presented. Algorithms for scheduling and contracting with customers are also presented for energy service companies. An introduction to the various commodity and financial market products includes the use of futures and options for GENCOs. The material is useful for students performing research on the new business environment based on competition. Regulators will find information on initial methods of designing and evaluating market systems, and power exchange and financial analysts will find information on the interdependence of markets and power system-based techniques for risk management. This information compares the new business environment solutions with old business environment solutions. Computational Auction Mechanisms for Restructured Power Industry Operation provides a first introduction to how electricity will be traded as a commodity in the future.
Before the energy crisis of the 1970s, electricity provision was a non-issue the world over, but the crisis of 1973 induced policymakers worldwide to consider private and restructured electricity provision as an alternative to unified, publicly and privately owned systems. Czamanski examines arguments and experiences concerning the divestitute of state-owned enterprises in a variety of political and technological contexts. He also considers restructuring under the Thatcher government in Great Britian, the reforms drafted by Czamanski in Israel, and restructuring in the United States as well as events in Norway, the Pacific Rim, Canada, and the developing countries. In addition, he considers the advantages and disadvantages of privatizing through theoretical discussion and by exploring experiences in various countries.
The writing of this book was largely motivated by the ongoing unprecedented world-wide restructuring of the power industry. This move away from the traditional monopolies and toward greater competition, in the form of increased numbers of independent power producers and an unbundling of the main services that were until now provided by the utilities, has been building up for over a decade. This change was driven by the large disparities in electricity tariffs across regions, by technological developments that make it possible for small producers to compete with large ones, and by a widely held belief that competition will be beneficial in a broad sense. All of this together with the political will to push through the necessary legislative reforms has created a climate conducive to restructuring in the electric power industry. Consequently, since the beginning of this decade dramatic changes have taken place in an ever-increasing list of nations, from the pioneering moves in the United Kingdom, Chile and Scandinavia, to today's highly fluid power industry throughout North and South America, as well as in the European Community. The drive to restructure and take advantage of the potential economic benefits has, in our view, forced the industry to take actions and make choices at a hurried pace, without the usual deliberation and thorough analysis of possible implications. We must admit that to speak of "the industry" at this juncture is perhaps disingenuous, even misleading.
Deregulation of Electric Utilities reviews the main issues relating to the changing environment in the utility industry. Topics covered in depth include compensation for stranded costs, efficiency gains, institutional design, pricing, economics of scale, and network externalities. In addition, this book assesses early experiences in electricity deregulation in continental Europe, New Zealand, North America, and the United Kingdom.
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.
Power Structure examines the effects on economic performance of several key features of the U.S. electric power industry. Paramount among these are public versus private ownership, vertical integration versus deintegration, and retail competition versus monopoly distribution. Each of these, as well as other structural characteristics of utilities and their markets, are analyzed for their effects on costs and price. These issues are important for a number of reasons. The U.S. electric power industry is presently embarking on a fundamental restructuring in terms of integration and competition. In other countries, privatization of state-owned enterprises is being viewed as the answer to unsatisfactory performance. From a longer perspective, the question of the relative performance of publicly owned versus privately owned utilities in the U.S. has never been resolved. And despite much speculation there is little reliable evidence as to the importance of either vertical integration or competition.
Worldwide, the electric utility industry has been changing over the last several years as deregulation and privatization have been instituted. These changes in how the industry does business are summarized, and the evolving experience of the deregulation in 15 major countries is analyzed. In addition to the analysis, theoretical models and detailed case studies are provided to illustrate the changes. Utility regulatory agency personnel, utility management staff, and research professionals will all be interested in this work.
Electric utilities throughout the world continue to face new challenges involving ownership, market structure, and regulation. There are three related issues at hand. First, should ownership be private or public? Second, what operations should be integrated and where is competition feasible? Third, where is regulation necessary and can it be made more efficient? This volume bears directly upon these concerns. The book contains two sections. The first six articles discuss the British electricity experiment that has privatized and disintegrated the nation's generation, transmission, and distribution companies, introduced market competition for power purchases, and implemented incentive regulation for monopolized transmission and distribution grids. The remaining articles focus on the theater in which significant microeconomic issues will continue to emerge, most immediately in the U.K. and U.S.A. -- the coordination and pricing of transmission.
This book is unique in gathering under one over all the elements of electricity economics and planning, both for the traditional approach and for the new developments of the 1990s, e.g. privatisation, competition, deregulation and more efficient markets and pricing. All the fundamental institutional aspects of electricity in the 1990s are also discussed, particularly relevant at a time when the utilities of the developed world are being restructured, those of the ex-centrally planned economies are being profoundly reorganised and those of developing countries have enormous debt problems. The book describes how these challenges of the 1990s are to be understood and met.
Markets for Power provides an unusually complete analysis of the economic, technical, and institutional aspects of the electric utility industry. The authors evaluate four currently popular options for deregulating this unique segment of the economy, and in a balanced program for reform, they advise against total deregulation and recommend a cautious approach to even partial deregulation.Paul L. Joskow is Professor of Economics and Richard Schmalensee is Professor of Applied Economics, both at MIT
This book is a compilation of CRS reports on electric power. The large-scale damage caused by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria is examined in the context of policy options Congress may consider in order to help remediate such damage to the electrical grid in the future. Alternative electric power structures are examined for their ability to meet the post-Hurricane-Maria needs of Puerto Rico. The proposed Environmental Protection Agency plan to lower carbon emissions by providing each state with a carbon reduction target number. |
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