Pricing

Letters to the Editor

Robert Garvin, MAJ, TC, 3RD Corps Support Command: Serving here and seeing how poor the people of Iraq are after 30 years of a dictatorship is truly life changing. You would not believe the electricity challenges they face here. In a country of over 25 million people, Iraq has only about 5,000 MW of electricity at any given time.

Daniel Simon decided to investigate how much the extra heat of incandescent light bulbs over CFLs might cost a customer in air-conditioning cooling costs, compared to an analysis in “Squeezing BTUs From Light Bulbs.”

The Future of Electric Competition: Concentrated Power

An analysis of competitive power markets finds that oligopolies are the end game for liberalized power markets.

The British wholesale power market is about to enter a new phase. Having enjoyed a long period of surplus capacity, the combination of the forced retirement of some nuclear plant and continued demand growth is likely to lead to a capacity shortage within the next three to four years, and it is by no means clear whether the market, as it currently operates, will be able to maintain secure supplies.

A Better Measure for Profitability

A new way to measure what matters most: how close a unit comes to meeting its total potential profit.

Approximately 65 percent of capacity additions in the last few years have been gas-fired, combined-cycle units. Recent market conditions have been hard on these new resources, which have suffered from significantly low capacity factors. A better metric would measure a unit's ability to capture peak prices while minimizing shoulder period and off-peak losses. Furthermore, it would measure the extent to which a unit dispatches according to favorable market conditions.

Retail Risk-Based Pricing

A new approach to rate design.

Customers with greater risk require greater working capital set-asides to address anomalous or unexpected events.