Critique of the US Electricity Industry. Analysis of derailed industry deregulation initiatives. Sketches a new, competitively structured Energy Policy Template.

After 2 decades, policymakers and regulators agree that electricity market reform, liberalization and privatization remains partly art. Moreover, the international experience suggests that in nearly all cases, initial market reform leads to unintended consequences or introduces new risks, which must be addressed in subsequent “reform of the reforms. Competitive Electricity Markets describes the evolution of the market reform process including a number of challenging issues such as infrastructure investment, resource adequacy, capacity and demand participation, market power, distributed generation, renewable energy and global climate change. Sequel to Electricity Market Reform: An International Perspective in the same series published in 2006 Contributions from renowned scholars and practitioners on significant electricity market design and implementation issues Covers timely topics on the evolution of electricity market liberalization worldwide

The challenges currently facing particIpants m competitive electricity markets are unique and staggering: unprecedented price volatility, a crippling lack of historical market data on which to test new modeling approaches, and a continuously changing regulatory structure. Meeting these challenges will require the knowledge and experience of both the engineering and finance communities. Yet the two communities continue to largely ignore each other. The finance community believes that engineering models are too detailed and complex to be practically applicable in the fast changing market environment. Engineers counter that the finance models are merely statistical regressions, lacking the necessary structure to capture the true dynamic properties of complex power systems. While both views have merit, neither group has by themselves been able to produce effective tools for meeting industry challenges. The goal of this book is to convey the fundamental differences between electricity and other traded commodities, and the impact these differences have on valuation, hedging and operational decisions made by market participants. The optimization problems associated with these decisions are formulated in the context of the market realities of today's power industry, including a lack of liquidity on forward and options markets, limited availability of historical data, and constantly changing regulatory structures.

An expert's perspective on how competition can make this industry work. There has never been a coherent plan to restructure the electricity industry in the USâ??until now. Power expert Sally Hunt gets down to the critical lessons learned from the California power crisis and other deregulated markets, in which competition has been introduced properly and successfully. Hunt presents sensible solutions to power market reform that have been cultivated over her twenty years of professional work in the industry. Sally Hunt (New York, NY) spent twenty years at National Economic Research Associates, where she was head of NERA's U.S. energy practice and a member of the board. Coauthor of Competition and Choice in Electricity with Graham Shuttleworth (0471957828), she has served as Corporate Economist at Con Edison, Deputy Director of the New York City Energy Office, and Assistant Administrator of the New York City Environmental Protection Administration. Over the years, financial professionals around the world have looked to the Wiley Finance series and its wide array of bestselling books for the knowledge, insights, and techniques that are essential to success in financial markets. As the pace of change in financial markets and instruments quickens, Wiley Finance continues to respond. With critically acclaimed books by leading thinkers on value investing, risk management,asset allocation, and many other critical subjects, the Wiley Finance series provides the financial community with information they want. Written to provide professionals and individuals with the most current thinking from the best minds in the industry, it is no wonder that the Wiley Finance series is the first and last stop for financial professionals looking to increase their financial expertise.

Understand the electricity market, its policies and how they drive prices, emissions, and security, with this comprehensive cross-disciplinary book. Author Chris Harris includes technical and quantitative arguments so you can confidently construct pricing models based on the various fluctuations that occur. Whether you?re a trader or an analyst, this book will enable you to make informed decisions about this volatile industry.

Since the late 1980s, policy makers and regulators in a number of countries have liberalized, restructured or "deregulated their electric power sector, typically by introducing competition at the generation and retail level. These experiments have resulted in vastly different outcomes - some highly encouraging, others utterly disastrous. However, many countries continue along the same path for a variety of reasons. Electricity Market Reform examines the most important competitive electricity markets around the world and provides definitive answers as to why some markets have performed admirably, while others have utterly failed, often with dire financial and cost consequences. The lessons contained within are direct relevance to regulators, policy makers, the investment community, industry, academics and graduate students of electricity markets worldwide. - Covers electicity market liberalization and deregulation on a worldwide scale - Features expert contributions from key people within the electricity sector

This timely study evaluates four generic proposals for allowing free market forces toreplace government regulation in the electric power industry and concludes that none of thederegulation alternatives considered represents a panacea for the performance failures associatedwith things as they are now. It proposes a balanced program of regulatory reform and deregulationthat promises to improve industry performance in the short run, resolve uncertainties about thecosts and benefits of deregulation, and positions the industry for more extensive deregulation inthe long run should interim experimentation with deregulation, structural, and regulatory reformsmake it desirable.The book integrates modern microeconomic theory with a comprehensive analysis ofthe economic, technical, and institutional characteristics of modern electrical power systems. Itemphasizes that casual analogies to successful deregulation efforts in other sectors of the economyare an inadequate and potentially misleading basis for public policy in the electric power industry,which has economic and technical characteristics that are quite different from those in otherderegulated industries.Paul L. Joskow is Professor of Economics at MIT, author of ControllingHospital Costs (MIT Press 1981) and coauthor with Martin L. Baughman and Dilip P. Kamat of ElectricPower in the United States (MIT Press 1979). Richard Schmalensee, also at MIT, is Professor ofApplied Economics, author of The Economics of Advertising and The Control of Natural Monopolies, andeditor of The MIT Press Series, Regulation of Economic Activity.