Does Competition Reduce Costs? Assessing the Impact of Regulatory Restructuring on U.S. Electric Generation Efficiency

This paper explores the empirical effects of competition on technical efficiency in the context of electricity industry restructuring. Restructuring programs adopted by many U.S. states made utilities residual claimants to cost savings and increased their exposure to competitive markets. We estimate the impact of these changes on annual generating plant-level input demand for non-fuel operating expenses, the number of employees and fuel use. We find that municipally-owned plants, whose owners were for the most part unaffected by restructuring, experienced the smallest efficiency gains over the past decade. Investor-owned utility plants in states that restructured their wholesale electricity markets had the largest reductions in nonfuel operating expenses and employment, while investor-owned plants in nonrestructuring states fell between these extremes. The analysis also highlights the substantive importance of treating the simultaneity of input and output decisions, which we do through an instrumental variables approach.Efficiency, Production, Competition, Electricity restructuring, Electric Generation, Regulation

Two-dimensional cellular automata and the analysis of correlated time series

Correlated time series are time series that, by virtue of the underlying process to which they refer, are expected to influence each other strongly. We introduce a novel approach to handle such time series, one that models their interaction as a two-dimensional cellular automaton and therefore allows them to be treated as a single entity. We apply our approach to the problems of filling gaps and predicting values in rainfall time series. Computational results show that the new approach compares favorably to Kalman smoothing and filtering

COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

An extensive body of environmental justice literature has demonstrated repeatedly what impacted communities have long known from experience, that environmental pollution including groundwater threats, diesel particulate matter, toxic releases, pesticide use, and hazardous waste sites, disproportionately burdens people of color and low-income communities. The environmental justice movement seeks to bring about equal protection of all people from environmental hazards, including equal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. Advocacy within the movement has frequently adopted oppositional framings with respect to the state; however, collaborative approaches to environmental justice problem-solving have become more common, especially as states increasingly recognize environmental justice in policy. This thesis investigates a California community-based environmental reporting network called Identifying Violations Affecting Neighborhoods (IVAN) through interviews and participant observation in two sites: the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco, and the Imperial Valley in Southern California. The paper argues that IVAN functions to build relationships and trust between community members and government bodies, impose accountability on regulatory agencies, foster social learning that benefits all stakeholders, and solve pollution problems that affect public health, quality of life, and the physical environment. By creating and sustaining a forum that addresses community concerns related to the environment, IVAN acknowledges the validity of residents’ experiences, invites meaningful participation in the process of enforcement of environmental regulations, and, to a limited degree, reduces the pollution burden in low-income communities of color. I argue that in this way, IVAN’s collaborative approach to problem-solving is effective in bridging multiple dimensions of environmental justice

Strategies for producing biochars with minimum PAH contamination

With the aim to develop initial recommendations for production of biochars with minimal contamination with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), we analysed a systematic set of 46 biochars produced under highly controlled pyrolysis conditions. The effects of the highest treatment temperature (HTT), residence time, carrier gas flow and typical feedstocks (wheat / oilseed rape straw pellets (WSP), softwood pellets (SWP)) on 16 US EPA PAH concentration in biochar were investigated. Overall, the PAH concentrations ranged between 1.2 and 100 mg kg-1. On average, straw-derived biochar contained 5.8 times higher PAH concentrations than softwood-derived biochar. In a batch pyrolysis reactor, increasing carrier gas flow significantly decreased PAH concentrations in biochar; in case of straw, the concentrations dropped from 43.1 mg kg-1 in the absence of carrier gas to 3.5 mg kg-1 with a carrier gas flow of 0.67 L min-1; for woody biomass PAHs concentrations declined from 7.4 mg kg-1 to 1.5 mg kg-1 with the same change of carrier gas flow. In the temperature range of 350-650°C the HTT did not have any significant effect on PAH content in biochars, irrespective of feedstock type, however, in biochars produced at 750°C the PAH concentrations were significantly higher. After detailed investigation it was deduced that this intensification in PAH contamination at high temperatures was most likely down to the specifics of the unit design of the continuous pyrolysis reactor used. Overall, it was concluded that besides PAH formation, vaporisation is determining the PAH concentration in biochar. The fact that both of these mechanisms intensify with pyrolysis temperature (one increasing and the other one decreasing the PAH concentration in biochar) could explain why no consistent trend in PAH content in biochar with temperature has been found in the literature

Kinetic Accessibility of Buried DNA Sites in Nucleosomes

Using a theoretical model for spontaneous partial DNA unwrapping from histones, we study the transient exposure of protein-binding DNA sites within nucleosomes. We focus on the functional dependence of the rates for site exposure and reburial on the site position, which is measurable experimentally and pertinent to gene regulation. We find the dependence to be roughly described by a random walker model. Close inspection reveals a surprising physical effect of flexibility-assisted barrier crossing, which we characterize within a toy model, the "semiflexible Brownian rotor."Comment: final version as published in Phys. Rev. Let

Vector-axialvector mixing from a chiral effective field theory at finite temperature

We study the vector-axialvector mixing in a hot medium and its evolution toward the chiral phase transition using different symmetry restoration scenarios based on the generalized hidden local symmetry framework. We show that the presence of the $a_1$ meson reduces the vector spectral function around $\rho$ meson mass and enhances it around $a_1$ meson mass. The coupling strength of $a_1$ to $\rho$ and $\pi$ vanishes at the critical temperature due to the degenerate $\rho$-$a_1$ masses. This feature holds rigorously in the chiral limit and still stays intact to good approximation for the physical pion mass.Comment: v2:11 pages, 6 figures, reorganized and expanded the text, new plots and references added, main result and conclusions unchange