The objective of this analysis is to investigate the potential benefits of a regional electricity market in Southeast Europe in 2005. The study models the operation of the electric power systems of seven countries. The primary software tool is the GTMax model, which was used to analyze the operation of individual utility systems, as well as their operation in a regional electricity market. Four...

The battle for electricity customers in an increasingly competitive and deregulated market environment is one of the challenges facing the electric power utilities of today. Customers expect a reliable and efficient supply of power from their utilities. One of the advantages that a distributed generator (DG) can provide to the electric utility and to customers is the possibility of improving th...

The electric utility industry has undergone fundamental change in the last decade. Foremost of these changes have been numerous deregulation attempts. Producers and large consumers have built business models based upon large volume transactions, which lead to smooth production and volume discounting. The risks associated with using these traditional business models in deregulated markets are ma...

To quantify the potential value of technological advances to the photovoltaics (PV) sector, this paper examines the impact of changes to key PV module and system parameters on the levelized cost of energy (LCOE). The parameters selected include module manufacturing cost, efficiency, degradation rate, and service lifetime. NREL’s System Advisor Model (SAM) is used to calculate the lifecycle cost...

This paper examines a California-based microgrid’s decision to invest in a distributed generation (DG) unit fuelled by natural gas. While the long-term natural gas generation cost is stochastic, we initially assume that the microgrid may purchase electricity at a fixed retail rate from its utility. Using the real options approach, we find a natural gas generation cost threshold that triggers DG...

A number of state public utility commissions are using "social costing" methods to consider externalities in electricity resource planning. The most comprehensive and formal method is the use of monetary place-holders in the financial evaluation of new investments and potentially in system dispatch to reflect quantitative estimates of externality values. This approach necessarily must take exis...

We use a unique dataset that combines the responses from an original survey of households, information about the structural characteristics of their homes, utility-provided longitudinal electricity usage records, plus utility program participation information, to study the uptake of energy efficiency incentives and their effect on residential electricity consumption. Attention is restricted to ...

The standard approach to recovering the cost of electricity provision is to bill customers monthly for past consumption. If unable to pay, customers face disconnection, the utility loses revenue, and the service provision model is undermined. A possible solution to this problem is prepaid metering, in which customers buy electricity upfront and use it until the prepaid amount is consumed. We us...

Introduction During the pioneering days of the electric utility industry, it was believed that utilities were natural monopolies, meaning that one utility could service a geographic area more cheaply than any combination of smaller utilities. More recently, the economic viability of transferring or wheeling electricity over long distances, the development of small-scale generators and efficient...