The economics of renewable energy expansion in rural Sub-Saharan Africa

Accelerating development in Sub-Saharan Africa will require massive expansion of access to electricity -- currently reaching only about one-third of households. This paper explores how essential economic development might be reconciled with the need to keep carbon emissions in check. The authors develop a geographically explicit framework and use spatial modeling and cost estimates from recent engineering studies to determine where stand-alone renewable energy generation is a cost effective alternative to centralized grid supply. The results suggest that decentralized renewable energy will likely play an important role in expanding rural energy access. But it will be the lowest cost option for a minority of households in Africa, even when likely cost reductions over the next 20 years are considered. Decentralized renewables are competitive mostly in remote and rural areas, while grid connected supply dominates denser areas where the majority of households reside. These findings underscore the need to de-carbonize the fuel mix for centralized power generation as it expands in Africa.Energy Production and Transportation,Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases,Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Power&Energy Conversion,Carbon Policy and Trading

Solar Photovoltaic and Thermal Energy Systems: Current Technology and Future Trends

Solar systems have become very competitive solutions for residential, commercial, and industrial applications for both standalone and grid connected operations. This paper presents an overview of the current status and future perspectives of solar energy (mainly photovoltaic) technology and the required conversion systems. The focus in the paper is put on the current technology, installations challenges, and future expectations. Various aspects related to the global solar market, the photovoltaic (PV) modules cost and technology, and the power electronics converter systems are addressed. Research trends and recommendations for each of the PV system sectors are also discussed.Junta de Andalucía P11-TIC-7070Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2016-78430-

Using Laboratory Experiments to Design Efficient Market Institutions: The case of wholesale electricity markets

This paper assesses the contribution of laboratory experiments to the economics of design applied to the electricity industry. The analysis is dedicated to wholesale markets, and reviews the results accumulated to date concerning both the general architecture of power markets and the very details of the market rules or institution, that is the auction rule. We argue that these experimental results contribute to a better understanding of the performances properties and implementation features of competitive market designs and that experimental economics has proven very useful to public authorities to inform the restructuring of electricity industry. It thus confirms the role of experimental economics as a complement to theoretical approaches in the design effort.Experimental economics; market design; design economics; electricity auction;

Technological systems and momentum change: American electric utilities, restructuring, and distributed generation

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Comments in Response to FERC Rulemaking on Regional Transmission Organizations

On May 13, 1999 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) on Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO). The purpose of the NOPR is to seek comments on proposed regulatory rules that would encourage transmission system owners to participate in regional transmission organizations. Such organizations would manage various aspects of the operation and expansion of the nation's high voltage electric transmission system to support developing competitive wholesale and retail electric generation service markets that rely on these transmission networks. Regional integration of transmission systems is thought to be required to manage more effectively transmission network operations, to internalize various network externalities, and to facilitate the development of competitive electricity markets. Four non-profit Independent System Operators (ISOs) have already been created from the three existing tight power pools covering the Northeastern states and in California. However, the development of similar RTOs in other parts of the country has been slow. The FERC initiative aims at speeding up the development of such regional organizations. My comments focus primarily on the future structure of the regulatory framework that governs how transmission owners and operators will be compensated for providing transmission service. I also present a framework for evaluating the benefits and costs of not-for-profit ISOs that operate transmission facilities owned and maintained by others vs. for-profit Independent Transmission Companies (Transcos) that own, maintain, and operate their own transmission facilities. The success of the ongoing restructuring of the nation's electricity sector and its reliance on decentralized competitive generation service markets depends heavily on the existence of a robust transmission network that operates efficiently. Indeed, the new decentralized industry structure with a large number of economic agents pursuing their own self interests requires a more robust transmission network and enhanced operating capabilities than was the case during the era of vertically integrated regulated monopolies. Recent historical evidence suggests, however, that resources devoted to maintaining, operating, and expanding the nation's transmission networks are declining rather than increasing in relative terms. Continuing to rely on FERC's historical transmission regulatory framework is not likely to foster the kind of robust transmission networks that are required to support efficient competitive electricity markets. Traditional transmission regulatory procedures pay too much attention to the direct costs of transmission (capital and operating costs) and too little attention to the indirect costs of transmission (congestion, ancillary services, and local market power mitigation costs). It is very important for the FERC to adopt new regulatory mechanisms that provide transmission owners and operators with powerful economic incentives to operate transmission networks efficiently and to invest the resources necessary to expand their capabilities efficiently. These incentives should be an integral component of a performance-based regulatory (PBR) framework for the regulation of transmission rates that rewards transmission owners for achieving these objectives and penalizes them for failing to do so. There is a growing debate over whether RTOs should be non-profit ISOs or for-profit Transcos or some combination of the two organizational forms. This debate raises important issues, though the signal to noise ratio that has characterized this debate has not been very high. There are potentially significant costs resulting from the separation of ownership and maintenance decisions from transmission operating decisions, as is the case with ISOs. On the other hand, there are potential benefits associated with independence of the transmission operator from generation and marketing activities and the internalization of significant regional loop flow and related network externalities within a single organization. There are significant incentive issues that must be addressed both for non-profit ISOs and for-profit Transco monopolies. Viewed properly, it is not so much a choice between a not-for-profit ISO and a for-profit Transco, as it is a choice about the distribution of responsibilities between them.

Anticipating and Coordinating Voltage Control for Interconnected Power Systems

This paper deals with the application of an anticipating and coordinating feedback control scheme in order to mitigate the long-term voltage instability of multi-area power systems. Each local area is uniquely controlled by a control agent (CA) selecting control values based on model predictive control (MPC) and is possibly operated by an independent transmission system operator (TSO). Each MPC-based CA only knows a detailed local hybrid system model of its own area, employing reduced-order quasi steady-state (QSS) hybrid models of its neighboring areas and even simpler PV models for remote areas, to anticipate (and then optimize) the future behavior of its own area. Moreover, the neighboring CAs agree on communicating their planned future control input sequence in order to coordinate their own control actions. The feasibility of the proposed method for real-time applications is explained, and some practical implementation issues are also discussed. The performance of the method, using time-domain simulation of the Nordic32 test system, is compared with the uncoordinated decentralized MPC (no information exchange among CAs), demonstrating the improved behavior achieved by combining anticipation and coordination. The robustness of the control scheme against modeling uncertainties is also illustrated

HOMEBOTS: Intelligent Decentralized Services for Energy Management

The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the namewe have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a `society' of interactive household, industrial and utility equipment. They act as independent intelligent agents that communicate and negotiate in a computational market economy. The knowledge and competence aspects of this application are discussed, using an improved \ud version of task analysis according to the COMMONKADS knowledge methodology. Illustrated by simulation results, we indicate how customer knowledge can be mobilized to achieve joint goals of cost and energy savings. General implications for knowledge creation and its management are discussed