Electric utilities and regulators face difficult challenges evaluating new energy efficiency and smart grid programs prompted, in large part, by recent state and federal mandates and financial incentives. It is increasingly difficult to separate electricity use impacts of individual utility programs from the impacts of increasingly stringent appliance and building efficiency standards, increasi...

Public utility services matter. Around the world, access to clean water and sanitation facilities, effective telecommunications and Internet services and reliable energy and transport services are indispensible to individuals, societies and economies. Given their critical importance, the public utility industries have long been subject to government regulation. The pages that follow seek to des...

Traditionally, most consumers of electricity pay for their consumptions according to a fixed rate. With the advancement of Smart Grid technologies, large-scale implementation of variable-rate metering becomes more practical. As a result, consumers will be able to control their electricity consumption in an automated fashion, where one possible scheme is to have each individual maximize its own ...

This study describes the performance evaluation of an energy management system, based on electricity consumption, for a Gen 6 Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) panel plant. Of the various production lines and facility systems, the array system and the compressed dry air consumed the most electricity of 21.8% and 19.8%, respectively, while the public utility used only 1.6% of...

Electricity supply database from the Afghan national authority for electricity supply shows that about only 20% of the population in Afghanistan had access to grid electricity by 2010. The national utility has a total capacity of about 842 MW, out of which about 696 MW was operational. Additionally, many decentralized units (Micro Hydropower (MHP) plants, diesel generators and solar home system...

The distribution grid for delivering electricity to the user has been paid for as part of the charge per kilowatt-hour that covers the cost of the energy itself. Conservation advocates have promoted the adoption of policies that “decouple” electric distribution company revenues or profits from how much electricity goes through the lines. Their motivation is that usage-based pricing leads utilit...

Hydro-electric power utilities convert the potential energy of water to electricity through the operation of generation turbines. Each turbine unit has an operating range and incurs a fixed start-up cost. The problem of determining which turbines should be operating at any point during the day whilst ensuring that the demand for electricity is satisfied is known as the unit commitment problem. ...

This paper presents a comparative study of six soft computing models namely multilayer perceptron networks, Elman recurrent neural network, radial basis function network, Hopfield model, fuzzy inference system and hybrid fuzzy neural network for the hourly electricity demand forecast of Czech Republic. The soft computing models were trained and tested using the actual hourly load data obtained ...

Utility companies in Ghana estimate that electricity theft costs them over a billion US dollars in annual revenues. The purpose of this work is to provide an algorithm for the design of electricity theft monitoring system which allows violators to be detected at a remote location. It begins with the analysis of losses in electrical power systems. The bulk of these losses are caused by electrici...

In the United States, there is no comprehensive energy policy at the federal level. To address issues as diverse as climate change, energy security, and economic development, individual states have increasingly implemented Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs), which mandate that utility providers include a specified amount of electricity from renewable energy sources in their total energy portf...