Electricity Competition

Explains the economics of electricity at each step of the supply chain: production, transportation and distribution, and retail.

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.

This book fills a gap in the existing literature by dealing with several issues linked to long-term contracts and the efficiency of electricity markets. These include the impact of long-term contracts and vertical integration on effective competition, generation investment in risky markets, and the challenges for competition policy principles. On the one hand, long-term contracts may contribute to lasting generation capability by allowing for a more efficient allocation of risk. On the other hand, they can create conditions for imperfect competition and thus impair short-term efficiency. The contributors – prominent academics and policy experts with inter-disciplinary perspectives – develop fresh theoretical and practical insights on this important concern for current electricity markets. This highly accessible book will strongly appeal to both academic and professional audiences including scholars of industrial, organizational and public sector economics, and competition and antitrust law. It will also be of value to regulatory and antitrust authorities, governmental policymakers, and consultants in electricity law and economics.