Foresighted Demand Side Management

We consider a smart grid with an independent system operator (ISO), and distributed aggregators who have energy storage and purchase energy from the ISO to serve its customers. All the entities in the system are foresighted: each aggregator seeks to minimize its own long-term payments for energy purchase and operational costs of energy storage by deciding how much energy to buy from the ISO, and the ISO seeks to minimize the long-term total cost of the system (e.g. energy generation costs and the aggregators' costs) by dispatching the energy production among the generators. The decision making of the entities is complicated for two reasons. First, the information is decentralized: the ISO does not know the aggregators' states (i.e. their energy consumption requests from customers and the amount of energy in their storage), and each aggregator does not know the other aggregators' states or the ISO's state (i.e. the energy generation costs and the status of the transmission lines). Second, the coupling among the aggregators is unknown to them. Specifically, each aggregator's energy purchase affects the price, and hence the payments of the other aggregators. However, none of them knows how its decision influences the price because the price is determined by the ISO based on its state. We propose a design framework in which the ISO provides each aggregator with a conjectured future price, and each aggregator distributively minimizes its own long-term cost based on its conjectured price as well as its local information. The proposed framework can achieve the social optimum despite being decentralized and involving complex coupling among the various entities

Distributed Foresighted Energy Management in Smart-Grid-Powered Cellular Networks

This paper studies energy management in a smart grid-powered cellular network consisting of an independent system operator (ISO) and multiple geographically distributed aggregators. The aggregators have energy storage devices and can purchase energy from the electric grid via the ISO to serve their users. To account for the uncertainty of the renewable energy supply as well as the impacts of multiple aggregators on the electric grid and energy prices, a foresighted strategy combined with the adaptive ε-greedy method is developed for the aggregators to distributively and adaptively minimize the long-term overall cost of the system, based on the ahead-of-time decision making of the storage pre-charging amount. Simulation results validate that the proposed strategy surpasses a recent learning-based storage management design and a myopic design

Innovation and the Evolution of Market Structure for Internet Access in the United States

How and why did the U.S. commercial Internet access market structure evolve during its first decade? Commercial Internet access market structure arose from a propitious combination of inherited market structures from communications and computing, where a variety of firms already flourished and entrepreneurial norms prevailed. This setting nurtured innovative behavior across such key features as pricing, operational practices, and geographic coverage. Inherited regulatory decisions in communications markets had a nurturing effect on innovative activity. On-going regulatory decisions also shaped the market’s evolution, sometimes nurturing innovation and sometimes not. This narrative and analysis informs conjectures about several unique features of U.S. market structure and innovative behavior. It also informs policy debates today about the role of regulation in nurturing or discouraging innovation behavior.

Disarray at the headquarters : economists and central bankers tested by the subprime and the COVID recessions

The article explores the discussions among economic modelers and central banks research staff and decision makers, namely on the adequacy of unconventional monetary policy and fiscal expansionary measures after the subprime crisis and as the COVID recession is developing. First, the article investigates the arguments, models and policy proposals of several mainstream schools of economics that challenged the traditional Chicagoan orthodoxy based on Milton Friedman’s views, and developed the Lucas Critique, the New Classical synthesis and Real Business Cycle approach that replaced monetarism as the main rivals to old-time Keynesianism. Second, the transformation of Real Business Cycle models into Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models is mapped, as it extended the ideas of the iniquity of government intervention and unified academic and central bank research. Yet, a battery of criticism was levied against the DSGE models and, as the debate emerged over quantitative easing and other tools of unconventional monetary policy, the need for policy pragmatism shattered the previous consensus. The article then proceeds to discuss how the leading mainstream academic economists reacted to changes in central banks‘ practices, noticing a visible dissonance within Chicago-school and DSGE economists, as well as major contortions of central bankers in order to justify their new postures. The article concludes with a call for an extensive menu of fiscal, industrial and innovation policies in order to respond to recessions and structural crisesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns: Policy Design and Evaluation

This book is intended to highlight why SCP policy design and evaluation needs to overcome conventional environmental policy framework. Emerging SCP policy design and evaluation do not involve focusing on individual products or behaviors or improving efficiency in management systems in relation to environmental sustainability; instead, they address more socio-economic systems and target collective efforts for transition. Effort has been made for this book/Special Issue to feature studies contributing to policy design and evaluation in this direction. It contains 11 papers covering challenges and opportunities for SCP policy design, application of foresight to policy design, evaluation of NDC potentials to facilitate sustainable lifestyles, comparative analysis of sustainable development criteria, sustainable lifestyle and education, subjective wellbeing and sustainable consumption, case studies on challenges and opportunities for sustainability transition at the local and community level, and three case studies on how to fill gaps between policy goals and environmental behavior at a city level in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The papers in this book suggest that SCP policy design and evaluation need to pay more attention to social aspects of sustainability such as social infrastructure and well-being and socio-technical systems to ensure effective and just transition to sustainability