Electricity Prices In A Competitive Environment

Discusses the events that led to current initiatives to restructure the electric power industry, and the institutional and structural changes that will be required to support the competitive pricing of electricity. Describes the analysis assumptions and methodology. Compares electricity prices under regulation and prices under competition. Discusses the sensitivities of the results to key parameters in the analysis cases. Analyzes the cash flow implications of the new competitive prices for utilities. Extensive charts, tables and graphs.

Electricity markets are being deregulated or face new regulatory frameworks. In such changing markets, new pricing strategies will need to consider such factors as cost, value of service and pricing by objective. Pricing in Competitive Electricity Markets introduces a new family of pricing concepts, methodologies, models, tools and databases focused on market-based pricing. This book reviews important theoretical pricing issues as well as practical pricing applications for changing electricity markets.

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

Electricity Pricing In Transition is written to address the new issues facing utilities, retailers, regulators, and customers in the changing electricity market. It is organized into five sections. Section I deals with the new restructured organization that has emerged from yesterday's vertically integrated, regulated monopoly company. Section II deals with issues in competitive pricing. Section III reviews the role of demand response and product design in today's chaotic marketplace. Given the single importance of California's energy crisis and the fact that it will be studied for years to come, Section IV is devoted to studying the lessons learned from this crisis. The final section of the book deals with markets and regulations. This book will provide practitioners with guidance on how to avoid the major pitfalls in pricing electricity while the market is in transition by drawing upon the insights and lessons learned from the experience of others that are documented in this book.

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.

Bridges the knowledge gap between engineering and economics in a complex and evolving deregulated electricity industry, enabling readers to understand, operate, plan and design a modern power system With an accessible and progressive style written in straight-forward language, this book covers everything an engineer or economist needs to know to understand, operate within, plan and design an effective liberalized electricity industry, thus serving as both a useful teaching text and a valuable reference. The book focuses on principles and theory which are independent of any one market design. It outlines where the theory is not implemented in practice, perhaps due to other over-riding concerns. The book covers the basic modelling of electricity markets, including the impact of uncertainty (an integral part of generation investment decisions and transmission cost-benefit analysis). It draws out the parallels to the Nordpool market (an important point of reference for Europe). Written from the perspective of the policy-maker, the first part provides the introductory background knowledge required. This includes an understanding of basic economics concepts such as supply and demand, monopoly, market power and marginal cost. The second part of the book asks how a set of generation, load, and transmission resources should be efficiently operated, and the third part focuses on the generation investment decision. Part 4 addresses the question of the management of risk and Part 5 discusses the question of market power. Any power system must be operated at all times in a manner which can accommodate the next potential contingency. This demands responses by generators and loads on a very short timeframe. Part 6 of the book addresses the question of dispatch in the very short run, introducing the distinction between preventive and corrective actions and why preventive actions are sometimes required. The seventh part deals with pricing issues that arise under a regionally-priced market, such as the Australian NEM. This section introduces the notion of regions and interconnectors and how to formulate constraints for the correct pricing outcomes (the issue of "constraint orientation"). Part 8 addresses the fundamental and difficult issue of efficient transmission investment, and finally Part 9 covers issues that arise in the retail market. Bridges the gap between engineering and economics in electricity, covering both the economics and engineering knowledge needed to accurately understand, plan and develop the electricity market Comprehensive coverage of all the key topics in the economics of electricity markets Covers the latest research and policy issues as well as description of the fundamental concepts and principles that can be applied across all markets globally Numerous worked examples and end-of-chapter problems Companion website holding solutions to problems set out in the book, also the relevant simulation (GAMS) codes