Great Guy

The cold seeped through Officer Moriarity\u27s greatcoat and numbed his body. Steam spiraled from his nostrils in dragonesque patterns, and the far reaches of the street light at the mouth of the alley fell upon him and ricocheted off his badge and buttons as he lumbered toward the street. With cold numbed fingers he tugged a ponderous watch from beneath his coat and paused to examine its scarred face beneath the light ... eleven-thirty, half-an-hour until call-in time

Did English Generators Play Cournot? Capacity Withholding in the Electricity Pool

Electricity generators can raise the price of power by withholding their plant from the market. We discuss two ways in which this could have affected prices in the England and Wales Pool. Withholding low-cost capacity that should be generating will raise energy prices but make the pattern of generation less efficient. This pattern improved significantly after privatisation. Withholding capacity that was not expected to generate would raise the Capacity Payments based on spare capacity. On a multi-year basis, these did not usually exceed �competitive� levels, the cost of keeping stations open. The evidence for large-scale capacity withholding is weak

Retail Competition and Electricity Contracts

Long-term contracts for electricity can counter market power and reduce prices in short-term markets. If electricity retailers face competition, however, companies signing long-term contracts are exposed to the risk that a fall in short-term prices would allow rivals to buy on the spot market and undercut them. Could this lead to less contracting and higher prices? This paper combines a model of electricity retailing and a Cournot model of competition in the wholesale markets to estimate the size of this effect, and finds that it could raise wholesale prices by two or three percent

Regulators and the poor - Lessons from the United Kingdom

The author studies a number of ways in which British regulators have helped poorer consumers. British Telecommunications offers a lower user tariff, and a very cheap service with most outgoing calls barred, to attract customers who could not afford the full service. The gas regulator has taken action to reduce price differentials between customers who pay in cash (mostly, but not always, poor customers) and those who pay with bank transfers (mostly, but not always, better off customers). The electricity industry faces a series of rules and codes of practice governing its dealings with domestic consumers. Some of these schemes will help all consumers; others are aimed at, but not exclusive to, the poor. One challenge facing utilities in some countries is that of expanding their networks to reach millions of unserved (mostly poor) customers. The United Kingdom achieved nearly universal service in geographical terms while the utilities were state-owned. The utilities were serving some customers who were already profitable and were simply required to serve others, which might not be. It might be possible, to grant a concession, or privatize a new company, on a similar basis of"bundling"social obligations with opportunities for profit, but it will be important to ensure that obligations are performed properly. United Kingdom regulators have been fairly successful at protecting existing customers; other countries may be able to copy some of their techniques.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance

Harmonic Cheeger-Simons characters with applications

We initiate the study of harmonic Cheeger-Simons characters, with applications to smooth versions of the Geometric Langlands program in the abelian case.Comment: 13 pages, Latex2e, final version, Journal of Geometry and Physics (to appear

Can capital markets replace banks for funding community development?

Securities markets depend on data. In the absence of data, it is not possible to underwrite risk,> and judgments about risk are crucial to securities pricing. This essay discusses the sort of data> that would be necessary to make underwriting decisions for community development funding.

Why did British Electricity Prices Fall after 1998?

In an attempt to reduce high electricity prices in England and Wales the government has reduced concentration among generators and introduced New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA). Econometric analysis on monthly data from April 1996 to September 2002 implies support for two conflicting hypotheses. On a static view, increases in competition and the capacity margin were chiefly responsible for the fall in prices. If generators had been tacitly colluding before NETA, however, the impending change in market rules might have changed their behaviour a few months before the abolition of the Pool. That view implies that NETA reduced prices

RepoMMan : delivering private repository space for day-to-day use

In the spring of 2005, the University of Hull embarked on the RepoMMan Project, a two-year JISC-funded endeavour to investigate a number of aspects of user interaction with an institutional repository. The vision at Hull was, and is, of a repository placed at the heart of a Web services architecture: a key component of a university's information management. In this vision the institutional repository provides not only a showcase for finished digital output, but also a workspace in which members of the University can, if they wish, develop those same materials. The RepoMMan Project set out to consider how a range of Web services could be brought together to allow a user to interact easily with private workspace in an institutional repository and how the Web services might ease the transition from a private work-in-progress to a formally exposed object in the repository complete with metadata. Three key decisions had been taken before the project proposal was submitted and will not be further discussed here: that open source software should be employed for the project, that the Web services should be orchestrated by an implementation of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and that the Fedora repository software should be used