Nodal Pricing and Transmissions Losses. An Application to a Hydroelectric Power System

Since January 1st, 1997, the wholesale electricity market in the U.S. has been open to competition through FERC Order 888. In order to satisfy the reciprocity requirements which were imposed by FERC to foreign utilities, Hydro-Québec made her transmission grid accessible to third parties. A single flat rate is applied to account for transmission losses; location and time of use play no role. Hydro-Québec is a hydro based utility and it has very long linear high voltage power lines which link hydro power sites in the north to consumption centres in the south. In this paper, we compare three different methods of incorporating transmission losses into nodal prices for a simpplified model of Hydro-Québec electric network: flat rate, linear power loss rates, and quadratic power loss rates. The latter two vary by node and time of use. We estimate that nodal price differences between the flat rate and the quadratic power loss rates can be as large as 27.8% on the producer side and 32.7% on the consumer side. The implications of such price differences for the location of economic activity over the service area could be significant.Electricity, Transmission Pricing, Hydro Power

Undocumented Migrant Workers in a Fragmented International Order

This Paper tries to show the effects of a central challenge of contemporary global governance: the interaction between normative orders that are fundamentally different in their underlying conceptual structure. The argument is that the dynamics of globalization create and accentuate particular social phenomena as well as efforts towards coordinated regulation of these phenomena, but that the latter are far from sufficient to meet the former. A further assertion is that global relations and distributions of power determine the operation of this fragmented framework. Social vulnerability is reflected in and reinforced by it. As such, the undocumented migrant worker challenges, in many senses of the term, the margins of global governance and international law: the boundaries reflected in sovereign territoriality which continue to undergird international law, and to represent the limits of its permissible jurisdiction, and yet which are challenged by the aspiration towards globalization embodied physically in the person of the undocumented migrant worker. In this sense, the undocumented migrant both fulfills and transgresses the global order. This Paper represents a series of meditations on this theme. Parts I and II indicate the broader reaches of this analysis, discussing illegal markets in the global order more generally and clarifying theoretical and methodological commitments. Parts III and IV examine in more detail the figure of the undocumented migrant worker at both the international and national plane. Parts V and VI cash out both the material and discursive effects of the current approaches to irregular migration

Re-Reading Weber in Law and Development: A Critical Intellectual History of Good Governance Reform

The Weberianism of the modern age derives from the influence of three theoretical concepts in Weber\u27s work. First, Weber described the development of logically formal rationality in governance as central to the rise of Western capitalist democracy. Second, Weber posited that Protestant religious ethics had helped to promote certain economic behaviors associated with contemporary capitalism. Third, Weber identified the rise of bureaucratic governance, as the primary means of realizing logically formal rationality, as distinctly modern. This essay examines the influence of these basic insights on discourse on legal reform in developing countries. The prioritization of legal and institutional reforms to achieve good governance seems to be part of a larger intellectual shift to the problems and challenges of governance in a globalizing world. Transmitters of Weberian analysis in this milieu, however, have at times elided important nuances in Weber\u27s own thought -- nuances that, if incorporated, might have significant implications within development discourse. The paper\u27s objectives are: first, to conduct an intellectual history that shows how one of the greatest sociologists influenced an increasingly important area of law reform in the age of globalization; second, to surface critiques arising within that field of law reform; and third, to suggest that there may be some connection between the two. In that sense, the paper seeks to make a contribution to two discourses: to enrich the study of the history of legal thought the reception of an important thinker has shaped contemporary law and policy in a relatively understudied field in the academy; and at the same time to underscore and contextualize policy critiques that have arisen in an increasingly important field of practice