The ethanol blend wall and high RIN prices has become a controversial policy issue. We develop a model showing how RIN prices reflect the costs of overcoming the blend wall, namely biodiesel consumed in excess of its mandate and expansion of E85 sales. These costs are very high and are shown to be borne by producers and consumers of ethanol and gasoline. Although RIN prices reduce consumer pric...

Meeting US ethanol blending mandates proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency will require a substantial number of motorists with flex-fuel vehicles to switch from low ethanol-gasoline blends to high ethanol-gasoline blends. The lower the willingness to pay for high-ethanol blends, the greater the cost of complying with the proposed mandates. Existing estimates of the willingness to pay ...

We develop a stochastic model of zonal/regional electricity prices, designed to reflect information in fuel forward curves and aggregated capacity and load as well as zonal or regional price spreads. We use a nonparametric model of the supply stack that captures heat rates and fuel prices for all generators in the market operator territory, combined with an adjustment term to approximate conges...

In this paper, the Classical Lagrange’s method has been proposed to find the optimal solution for Combined Economic and Emission Dispatch (CEED) problems in comparison with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based algorithm. The ultimate aim in the CEED problem is that scheduling of generators should operate with both minimum fuel costs and emission levels, simultaneously, while meeting the load...

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 targets use of 36 billion gallons of biofuels per year by 2022. Achieving this may require substantial changes to current transportation fuel systems for distribution, dispensing, and use in vehicles. The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory designed a system dynamics approach to help focus government action by d...

abstract producing of flowers and ornamental plants in iran has some challenges and failure in the market structure and marketing of these products. in this study, we evaluated the different marketing channels of flowers and ornamental plants in the existing market structure according to economic criteria and the characteristics of market structure. cut-rose and esfahan province were selected a...