P aul Samuelson (1969) was once asked by a physicist for a law in economics that was both nontrivial and true. This is a difficult challenge, as many (roughly) true results are in the end rather trivial (for example, demand curves slope down), while many nontrivial results in economics in fact require too much sophistication and rationality on the part of the agents to actually hold true in pra...

We review power laws in financial economics. This is a chapter from a preliminary draft of a book called “Beyond equilibrium and efficiency”. While some of the discussion is specific to economics, most of it applies to power laws in general – the nouns may change, but the underlying questions are similar in many fields. This draft is still preliminary and not entirely finished – comments at any...

arbitrage is a known economic term, implying simultaneous transaction on commodities. for instance, a generation company (genco) may involve itself in selling fuel, emission allowance and etc., instead of generating either active or reactive power. moreover, arbitrage between active and reactive powers can, in turn, be considered. in this paper, arbitrage between active and reactive power is c...

The variable and uncertain nature of wind generation presents a new concern to power system operators. One of the biggest concerns associated with integrating a large amount of wind power into the grid is the ability to handle large ramps in wind power output. Large ramps can significantly influence system economics and reliability, on which power system operators place primary emphasis. The Wi...

Emerging microscale distributed energy technologies offer the opportunity for transformation to a more efficient and sustainable energy future. This will be achieved by delivering energy services from technologies that convert local intermittent renewable energy resources (eg wind, solar, wave), and small, silent generators that produce both heat and power from a range of locally available fuel...

Climate change is likely to affect the generation of energy from California’s high-elevation hydropower systems. To investigate these impacts, this study formulates a linear programming model of an 11-reservoir hydroelectric system operated by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in the Upper American River basin. Four sets of hydrologic scenarios are developed using the Variable Infiltrat...

The major shortcoming of Grid middleware systems is the lack of economic-enhanced Grid services. These new services are necessary in order to let Grid users benefit from the properties of the Grid. Those properties comprise the availability of on-demand computational power, simplicity of access to resources, low cost of ownership, and a pay-for-use pricing model in addition to the already lever...

Wind generation with an uncertain nature poses many challenges in grid integration and secure operation of power system. One of these operation problems is the unit commitment. Demand Response (DR) can be defined as the changes in electric usage by end-use customers from their normal consumption patterns in response to the changes in the price of electricity over time. Further, DR can be also d...