Green-electricity programs provide an opportunity to study private provision of an environmental public good in a field setting. The first part of this paper develops a theoretical framework to analyze household decisions about voluntary participation in green-electricity programs. We consider different participation mechanisms and show how they relate to existing theory on either pure or impur...

The structure of Japan's electricity sector, as modified by legislation in 1995 and 1999, will be reviewed in 2003. At that time, it is likely that further decisions will be made regarding the restructuring of Japan's electricity sector. The objectives of this study are to provide insight into the alternative ways that the sector might be restructured and the experience of other countries that ...

Researchers for the electricity industry, national laboratories, and state and federal agencies have begun to argue that the country could face water shortages resulting from the addition of thermoelectric power plants, but have not attempted to depict more precisely where or how severe those shortages will be. Using county-level data on rates of population growth collected from the US Census B...

Smart meters are increasingly being deployed to measure electricity consumption of residential as well as non-residential consumers. The readings reported by these meters form a time series, which is stored at electric utility servers for billing purposes. Invalid readings may be reported because of malicious compromise of the smart meters themselves, or of the network infrastructure that suppo...

The recent push for a federal energy policy that could substantially change electricity prices in the U.S. highlights the need to obtain accurate residential electricity demand estimates. Many electricity demand estimates have been obtained based on the assumption that consumers optimize with respect to known marginal prices, but increasing empirical evidence suggests that consumers are more li...

This paper applies parametric and non-parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in Germany. We address traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking, such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size, as well as new evidence specific to the situation in Germany This paper applies parametric and non-parametric and parametric t...

The impacts of market liberalisation on the electricity supply sector depend on many different factors and boundary conditions. Comparing these impacts in Austria and Germany, two countries which both participate in the European internal market and have a central geographical location in Western Europe, and which both have borders and important trade relationships with Central European countrie...

Electric vehicles (EV) can become integral parts of a smart grid, since they are capable of providing valuable services to power systems other than just consuming power. As an important solution to balance the intermittent renewable energy resources, such as wind power and PVs, EVs can absorb the energy during the period of high electricity penetration and feed the electricity back into the gri...

In recent decades, many megacities in the world have suffered from increasingly frequent heat waves. During heat waves, air-conditioners, refrigerators, and electric fans add a considerable peak demand on electrical utility grids, and on the supply side, high temperatures exert adverse effects on electricity generation, transmission, and distribution. Without pro-active planning and mitigation ...

The purpose of this Essay is threefold. First, to describe the Italian reform in electricity markets, comparing the models of liberalization and privatization followed by the Italian legislator with the British and French experiences. Second, to analyze the structure of the Italian electricity industry, which arose from the reform, and to study its effects in terms of increased competition from...