Electric utilities throughout the world continue to face new challenges involving ownership, market structure, and regulation. There are three related issues at hand. First, should ownership be private or public? Second, what operations should be integrated and where is competition feasible? Third, where is regulation necessary and can it be made more efficient? This volume bears directly upon these concerns. The book contains two sections. The first six articles discuss the British electricity experiment that has privatized and disintegrated the nation's generation, transmission, and distribution companies, introduced market competition for power purchases, and implemented incentive regulation for monopolized transmission and distribution grids. The remaining articles focus on the theater in which significant microeconomic issues will continue to emerge, most immediately in the U.K. and U.S.A. -- the coordination and pricing of transmission.

Energy has moved to the forefront in terms of societal and economic development. Modern Energy Markets is a comprehensive, economically oriented, exploration of modern electricity networks from production and distribution to deregulation and liberalization processes. Updating previous work by the authors, different aspects are considered resulting in a complete and detailed picture of the systems and characteristics of modern electricity markets. Modern Energy Markets provides clear detail whilst encompassing a broad scope of topics and includes: •A method to model energy production systems including the main characteristics of future demand side management, •Different applications of this model in nuclear and renewable energy scenarios, •An analysis of Real-Time Pricing of electricity and its potential effects across the market, and, •A discussion of the need for regulation in an easily monopolized industry. Engineering and Economics students alike will find that Modern Energy Markets is a succinct and informative resource, as will researchers interested in environmental and energy issues. The inclusion of timely and relevant issues related to economic decision will also be of value to industry and civil officials.

This book responds to the opening up of electricity markets to competition, which has completely changed the nature of power generation. The building of new generation and transmission capacity and the setting of the energy mix between nuclear, gas and renewable resources are mainly left to private initiative and investors. The authors and the editor of this book explore whether or not market forces offer a sustainable future for electricity generation. They employ economic theory and method to answer questions such as: Will the market be able to ensure adequacy of generation capacity and secu.

The authors are prominent economists, operation researchers, and engineers who have been instrumental in the development of the conceptual framework for electric power restructuring both in the United States and in other countries. Rather than espousing a particular market design for the industry's future, each author focuses on an important issue or set of issues and tries to frame the questions for designing electricity markets using an international perspective. The book focuses on the economic and technical questions important in understanding the industry's long-term development rather than providing immediate answers for the current political debates on industry competition.

Challenging Neighbours provides wide coverage of the German and Dutch economies, from an institutional point of view. Pensions, competition policy, labour relations, corporate governance, and health care are among the topics for which the institutional setting and performance of Germany and the Netherlands are compared. The difficulties and successes the countries have in facing pressures from aging population, developments in technology, and global competition are traced back to their institutional roots, and lead to mutual lessons for institutional reform for German and Dutch policy makers.

A comprehensive resource that provides the basic concepts of electric power systems, microeconomics, and optimization techniques Electricity Markets: Theories and Applications offers students and practitioners a clear understanding of the fundamental concepts of the economic theories, particularly microeconomic theories, as well as information on some advanced optimization methods of electricity markets. The authors—noted experts in the field—cover the basic drivers for the transformation of the electricity industry in both the United States and around the world and discuss the fundamentals of power system operation, electricity market design and structures, and electricity market operations. The text also explores advanced topics of power system operations and electricity market design and structure including zonal versus nodal pricing, market performance and market power issues, transmission pricing, and the emerging problems electricity markets face in smart grid and micro-grid environments. The authors also examine system planning under the context of electricity market regime. They explain the new ways to solve problems with the tremendous amount of economic data related to power systems that is now available. This important resource: Introduces fundamental economic concepts necessary to understand the operations and functions of electricity markets Presents basic characteristics of power systems and physical laws governing operation Includes mathematical optimization methods related to electricity markets and their applications to practical market clearing issues Electricity Markets: Theories and Applications is an authoritative text that explores the basic concepts of the economic theories and key information on advanced optimization methods of electricity markets.

Power Structure examines the effects on economic performance of several key features of the U.S. electric power industry. Paramount among these are public versus private ownership, vertical integration versus deintegration, and retail competition versus monopoly distribution. Each of these, as well as other structural characteristics of utilities and their markets, are analyzed for their effects on costs and price. These issues are important for a number of reasons. The U.S. electric power industry is presently embarking on a fundamental restructuring in terms of integration and competition. In other countries, privatization of state-owned enterprises is being viewed as the answer to unsatisfactory performance. From a longer perspective, the question of the relative performance of publicly owned versus privately owned utilities in the U.S. has never been resolved. And despite much speculation there is little reliable evidence as to the importance of either vertical integration or competition.