Showing papers in "Utilities Policy in 1998"

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify and discuss important differences between regression analysis and data envelopment analysis (DEA) and illustrate the theoretical issues with the help of an application of regression analysis on recent data from the regulated water industry in England and Wales.

TL;DR: The authors describes green power marketing activities, reviews aspects of the extensive literature on public goods, free-riders, and collective action problems, and explores some of the implications of this literature for the green marketing of renewable energy.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss how conflicts between the multiple objectives of policy-makers (efficiency, equity, fiscal, speed of reform, signalling, etc.) can influence the optimal design of concessions contract for network services in infrastructure.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a critical assessment of the English Electricity Pool Review's proposals, and suggest that they fail to present an adequate analysis of how the proposed solutions address the problems, and may well be counter-productive if the real source of the problem, namely market power, is properly addressed.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a modified translog cost model which examines whether economies of scale genuinely exist in the provision of electric transmission service and find strong economies over all relevant ranges of capacity and across all regions of the USA.

TL;DR: In this paper, a review of DSM shareholder incentive designs and earnings for 10 U.S. utilities is presented, and five specific recommendations are made: (1) apply shared-savings incentives to DSM resource programs (2) use markup incentives for individual programs only when net benefits are difficult to measure, but are known to be positive (3) set expected incentive payments based on covering a utility's hidden costs, which include some transitional management and risk-adjusted opportunity costs (4) use higher marginal incentives rates than are currently found in practice, but limit total incentive payments by

TL;DR: The authors assesses the external costs of water abstraction from rivers, and underlying aquifers, by water companies and assesses whether these benefits exceed the costs to water companies of replacing the water from elsewhere plus the additional cost to the Environment Agency of engaging in other engineering operations to alleviate low flows in rivers in south-west England.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate a telephone access demand model for the United Kingdom using a pseudo-panel data set based on the Family Expenditure Survey, and study the impact of price variations on household access.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the market mechanism provides an incomplete governance for wholesale-electricity transactions in the U.K. using a transaction-cost approach, and the competitive price mechanism is only one component of a more complex arrangement, which is a hybrid form consisting of a Pooling and Settlement Agreement and its governance structure.

TL;DR: In this article, the production costs of six cogeneration technologies, including both fossil fuels and biomass, are compared to the production cost of five technologies for power generation in the Nordic countries.

TL;DR: The government of Spain has initiated a process of liberalizing the electricity market starting in 1998 and signed a Protocol with the electric utilities in December 1996 outlining the general structure of these changes as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The economic value of wholesale electricity in a supergrid is a function of the size of demand and the adequacy of transmission capacity, both of which influence the intensity of competition amongst gensets as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the various types of generation and transmission resources used to supply reactive power and to control voltage, and discuss how these resources are deployed and paid for in several reliability regions around the country.

TL;DR: With the exception of the water supply industry, all major utilities in Hong Kong are owned and operated by private enterprises as mentioned in this paper In terms of price, returns, and productivity, Hong Kong compares unfavourably with privately-owned utilities.