Dynamic incentive strategy for voluntary demand response based on TDP scheme

Abstract-The enhanced real-time metering and communication capabilities from smart meters and their associated advanced metering infrastructure make it possible for utility company to extend demand response (DR) to small customers through timedependent pricing (TDP). Considering the economic reason and infrastructure cost, the utility company has to design an incentive scheme to attract the traditional flat pricing (FP) users to be engaged in the TDP scheme. In this process, the utility company may share its revenue from the TDP scheme to those TDP users. It is found, with properly analyzing the energy procurement cost and user elasticity, a dynamic incentive strategy can be considered in dual-tariffs system when flat pricing (FP) and TDP pricing are co-existed. This dynamic incentive strategy gives appropriate stimulus to the users who are involved into the TDP program, and guarantee the utility company's profit at the same time

Differential Impact of Environmental Policy Instruments on Technological Change: A Review of the Empirical Literature

This survey reviews the empirical literature on the impact of environmental policy instruments on the rate and direction of technological change. The survey is explicitly focused on the empirical identification of the hypothesis to expect a stronger impact from market-based incentives than from non-market alternatives. The general picture emerging from the recent literature is that there is a clear impact of environmental policy on invention, innovation and diffusion of technologies. Although studies on a differential impact are still very scarce, the available evidence suggests that innovators look carefully for rent opportunities, which in turn depend on the specific incentives signalled by the type of (environmental) policy

Institutional analysis for nitrogen pollution abatement in a Waikato river sub-catchment in New Zealand

Nitrogen levels in water resources in the Waikato region are increasing, mainly as a result of non-point source pollution from agricultural activities. Non-point pollution management is a complex issue requiring sufficient information and appropriate institutions. This paper considers the environmental policy literature and analyse how institutions, contract design, and monitoring and transaction costs in the presence of farm heterogeneity encourage optimal abatement. The analysis identifies the key institutional issues to be addressed in the design of appropriate policy measures to address water quality in Waikato river sub-catchment.Environmental policy, Transaction cost, Compliance, Contract design, Heterogeneity, Environmental Economics and Policy,

A residential energy management system with offline population-based optimization

Expectable improvements in battery technology and lower prices will certainly contribute to increase the interest in residential energy storage systems in the near future. The installment of photovoltaic panels and the use of energy storage systems will help to reduce power losses in distribution and transmission power grid and increase network availability, and consequently, to reduce the dependency on the use of fossil fuels. The paper presents a light implementation of residential energy management system that integrates photovoltaic generation, an energy storage system and an electric vehicle. The goal of the system is to reduce the costs of electric consumer energy bill. The effectiveness of the system is verified through its application in several scenarios for the Portuguese context. An offline population-based algorithm, namely differential evolution method is used to adjust the objective function for the online control of the energy devices in the residential house.The present work has been developed under the EUREKA - ITEA2 Project FUSE-IT (ITEA-13023), Project GREEDI (ANI|P2020 17822), and has received funding from FEDER Funds through COMPETE program and from National Funds through FCT under the project UID/EEA/00760/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Penetrating localities: participatory development and pragmatic politics in rural Andhra Pradesh, India

This research sets out to explore the interface between the new politics of localisation and the political process in India. Governments and donors have increasingly emphasised the locality as the primary unit of development and politics. This new trajectory has been manifest in the increase of community-based organisations and mechanisms of participatory governance at the local level. From the late 1990s, the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh emerged as one of the most important examples of this new developmental politics and this research sets out to explore how local dynamics changed as a result. Political economy approaches tend to focus on state-periphery relations in terms of interest groups or vote banks. By contrast, this research found the village to be an enduring unit in the political system through which political identity manifests itself through three features. First, participation in local elections is driven by common forces of politics of parties, caste and corruption but its outcome is dependent on the specific context at the village level. Second, new participatory institutions created through state policy were found to merge with informal practices at the local level and produce a complex interplay between the new local and state identities. Third, analysis of leadership found evidence of a well-defined system of organisation within party groups at the village level, which were shaped not by party institutions but by the inner workings of village politics. These findings give cause to reassess the way in which we understand policy and political change. I do so by expanding on Skocpol's polity approach, which focused attention on the dynamic interplay of policy and social structure. Drawing on elements of the 'political development' theory, the concept of a ‘developing polity’ approach is elaborated on, to better explain the complex interplay between local and higher level politics. These findings have implications for understanding both political change in India and development strategy. The macro-perspective on the decay of political institutions is contrasted with a local perspective that finds evidence of the vitality of party politics at the village level. This has a number of important implications for development, both in terms of the way in which we analyse participation and the way in which participatory development can be translated into political chang

Marketable pollution permits : an economic incentive for managing air and water pollution

The use of the marketable pollution permit (MPP) concept as an economic incentive for managing air and water pollution is examined. Forms of MPP systems include transferable discharge permits (TDPs), ambient permit systems (APS), emission permit systems (EPS) and the hybrid pollution-offset system (POS). The key insight is that a specialised market can be created for the trading of a new property right, the MPP, which entitles holders to discharge a specified quantity of pollution. Polluters who abate their pollution relatively cheaply would undertake more of the physical abatement effort and sell their surplus MPPs to polluters who face higher abatement costs. Aggregate pollution discharges would remain the same or be reduced by such trades. In the United States of America there is active experimentation with MPP systems. The US Environment Protection Agency has pioneered the bubble, offsets and banking regulations under its innovative Emission Trading Policy for air pollution control. The State of Wisconsin has introduced a transferable discharge permit system for controlling BOD water pollution. Both these schemes bear a close resemblance to the hybid pollution offsets scheme proposed by Krupnick, Oates and Van De Verg (1983) and highlight the emerging convergence of economic theory and practical implementation of pollution controls. The MPP is favoured as a regulatory reform for reducing the aggregate costs of pollution abatement. It is more cost-effective than existing standards-based systems on their own and is a more practical strategy than the introduction of pollution charges systems. The potential application of the MPP concept in Australia is then examined. It is concluded that a MPP scheme along the lines of the hybrid pollution-offsets system is a worthwhile model on which to base the design and implementation of a MPP scheme in certain situations in Australia. Only in regions associated with major cities having a sufficient density of pollution sources could such a competitive, specialised market for MPPs become established and viable. This MPP scheme could be embedded in the existing standards-based regulatory system. In other areas where such specialised markets would not be viable, it is nevertheless concluded that provisions akin to the bubble and offsets concepts developed by the USEPA could be introduced throughout Australia as a worthwhile adaption to existing pollution control laws. In fact progress in this direction in some jurisdictions has commenced

Electricity Market Designs for Demand Response from Residential Customers

The main purpose of this dissertation is to design an appropriate tariff program for residential customers that encourages customers to participate in the system while satisfying market operators and utilities goals. This research investigates three aspects critical for successful programs: tariff designs for DR, impact of renewable on such tariffs, and load elasticity estimates. First, both categories of DR are modeled based on the demand-price elasticity concept and used to design an optimum scheme for achieving the maximum benefit of DR. The objective is to not only reduce costs and improve reliability but also to increase customer acceptance of a DR program by limiting price volatility. A time of use (TOU) program is considered for a PB scheme designed using a monthly peak and off peak tariff. For the IBDR, a novel optimization is proposed that in addition to calculation of an adequate and a reasonable amount of load change for the incentive also finds the best times to request DR. Second, the effect of both DR programs under a high penetration of renewable resources is investigated. LMP variation after renewable expansion is more highly correlated with renewable’s intermittent output than the load profile. As a result, a TOU program is difficult to successfully implement; however, analysis shows IBDR can diminish most of the volatile price changes in WECC. To model risk associated with renewable uncertainty, a robust optimization is designed considering market price and elasticity uncertainty. Third, a comprehensive study to estimate residential load elasticity in an IBDR program. A key component in all demand response programs design is elasticity, which implies customer reaction to LSEs offers. Due to limited information, PB elasticity is used in IBDR as well. Customer elasticity is calculated using data from two nationwide surveys and integrated with a detailed residential load model. In addition, IB elasticity is reported at the individual appliance level, which is more effective than one for the aggregate load of the feeder. Considering the importance of HVAC in the aggregate load signal, its elasticity is studied in greater detail and estimated for different customer groupings

Three studies in economics

Section I. The impact of the U.S. wheat export enhancement program on the world wheat market. The U.S. Export Enhancement Program (EEP) was included in the 1985 U.S. Food Security Act with a major objective being to increase sales of U.S. agricultural commodities. Through the EEP, the U.S. government subsidizes exports of agricultural commodities to targeted importing countries. The EEP was applied to the majority of U.S. wheat sales in 1987/88 and 1988/89. Coincident with the 1985 act and EEP legislation, U.S. wheat exports have increased significantly. This study uses a nonspatial, partial equilibrium model of world wheat trade to analyze the impact of the EEP on U.S. wheat exports and share of world wheat trade. The study indicates that the effect of the EEP on the wheat market over the period 1986/87 to 1988/89 has been a large displacement of commercial wheat sales (87-92%), with export additionality due to the EEP being only 8-13%. The impact of the EEP on other exporters\u27 wheat trade and importer demand has been small relative to the magnitude of total EEP sales;Section II. Export allocation and price discrimination policies under demand uncertainty. This paper investigates price discrimination policies for a large country disposing of a fixed quantity of output to a certain and an uncertain market. In addition to price elasticities of demand, risk is an important reason for price discrimination. A risk neutral government sets a higher price in the uncertain market than under certainty, but the effect of increased risk aversion is ambiguous. When exports are allocated ex ante, the risk neutral exporter allocates more output in the riskless market than under certainty. The ranking of price and quantity setting policies for foreign disposal of surplus output is generally ambiguous;Section III. An analysis of producer participation in government commodity programs. Participation decisions for profit maximizing producers in voluntary agricultural commodity programs are modeled to investigate the importance of the heterogeneity of land attributes in the participation decision. The comparative static analysis of changes in program parameters on aggregate participation, acreage planted, and input use is completed for a corn-soybean producer. A corn program participation rate equation is estimated using county level data for Iowa that provides support for the hypothesis that heterogeneity of land quality is a significant determinant in the program participation decision

Environmental policy instruments and eco-innovation: an overview of recent studies

A través de una revisión bibliográfica este trabajo busca analizar la efectividad de los instrumentos de política ambiental, en particular los de mando y control, instrumentos de mercado y planes voluntarios, que promueven la ecoinnovación. Este trabajo analiza la información presentada en 40 artículos de investigación publicados en revistas con procesos de revisión por pares para el periodo 2005-2012, rastreados a través de una búsqueda de palabras clave en la base de datos Scopus, la cual incorpora las principales revistas académicas relacionadas con la disciplina estudiada. Además, se incluyeron algunas fuentes adicionales después de revisar la lista de referencias de los trabajos más destacados. La literatura revisada adopta diferentes puntos de vista y persigue varios objetivos para comprender la relación entre los instrumentos de política ambiental y la ecoinnovación. En general, encontramos evidencia de que el rigor se establece como elemento clave en las políticas que determinan el cambio tecnológico a nivel ambiental. Entre las conclusiones más se relevantes, se destaca que el instrumento de mando y control impulsa la ecoinnovación, no obstante, es la continuidad en las inversiones lo que más se relaciona con el rigor esperado de las futuras políticas regulatorias. Estudios empíricos confirman que los instrumentos de mercado promueven un mayor incremento en la innovación y la difusión de tecnologías existentes en comparación con los principios de la innovación radical. Por otra parte, se sugiere que los instrumentos basados en incentivos económicos deben ser complementados con rigurosos controles en aras de hacerlos más efectivos. Se concluye además la necesidad de establecer complementariedades entre las medidas enfocadas a los promotores de este tipo de instrumentos y sus solicitantes, con fin de suscitar procesos de ecoinnovación al interior de las organizaciones

LABOR VERSUS LEARNING: EXPLAINING THE STATE-WISE VARIATION OF CHILD LABOR IN INDIA

What explains the variation of child labor rates across Indian states? This dissertation explores why certain states in India, which are not necessarily the wealthiest, have been able to reduce child labor significantly in the past few decades, while child labor continues to increase at alarming rates in other states. Previous economic and cultural explanations, which focus on household-level poverty or the hierarchical social stratification of Indian society fail to adequately explain variation in child labor rates across Indian states. This research project explores how systematic regional differences in bureaucratic performance and patterns of civic engagement have influenced child labor rates in Indian states. The dissertation articulates and tests several hypotheses about the efficacy of bureaucracy and civil society activity in implementing child labor and elementary education laws. This study employs a multi-level research design including a range of statistical and qualitative techniques of analysis to get at the social and institutional variables that influence parents’ decision to send a child to work. It utilizes cross-state survey dataset for 28 Indian states for the year 2005 to run statistical analyses which confirm the theoretical hypotheses. Further, two case studies based on six months of fieldwork in the two Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan provide further understanding of the theoretical mechanisms. This study finds that educational deprivation plays a key role in determining levels of child labor- even controlling for income, states that have focused on universal elementary education have been more successful at reducing child labor than states that have not prioritized elementary education