The rules of a number of electricity markets encourage renewable energy production and demand response through fixed support schemes and socialize the costs of integrating this production trough grid tariffs. These mechanisms are not economically efficient because they do not rely on market-based prices and do not consider the actual costs of achieving reliable system operation. This paper pres...

Policies to cap emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the U.S. economy could pose significant costs on the electricity sector, which contributes roughly 40 percent of total CO2 emissions in the U.S. Using a detailed simulation model of the electricity sector, we evaluate alternative ways that emission allowances can be allocated. Most previous emissions trading programs have allocated the major ...

Waste-to-Energy is a challenging management in developing countries. There are many different technologies to generate electricity or heat from wastes. However, reuse and recycling are first prioritized as left a fraction of waste can be used as energy recovery. The initial cost to generate electricity from solid waste incineration is prohibitively high due to its cost of advance technology and...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of total factor productivity (TFP) growth for the Iranian electric utilities during the period 1980-1993 on the basis of panel data. A translog cost function is used which accommodates firm - specific variability through a one - way error component model. The results show that the Iranian electricity supply industry experienced increasing returns to s...

The evolution of smart microgrid and its demandresponse characteristics not only will change the paradigms of the century-old electric grid but also will shape the electricity market. In this new market scenario, once always energy consumers, now may act as sellers due to the excess of energy generated from newly deployed distributed generators (DG). The smart microgrid will use the existing el...

The work described in this article was funded by the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC0205CH11231. This article is based on a longer technical report titled A Review of Recent RTO Benefit-Cost Studies: Toward More Comprehensive Assessments of FERC Electricity Restructuring Policies (LBNL-58027), available at http://ce...

In this paper we have examined the scale and cost inefficiency of a sample of Swiss electricity distribution utilities. To do so, we have considered estimation of a stochastic frontier average cost model using the approach suggested by Schmidt and Sickles (1984) for panel data. A translog cost function was estimated using panel data for a sample of 30 municipal utilities over the period 1992-19...