A structural shift from transaction-based, marginal cost pricing to fee-based service business models often accompanies We emergence of “platform” markets, i.e. multi-sided markets where an intermediary captures the value of the interaction between user groups. The many examples include...

Public electricity provision in Africa has been marred by under investment and frequent power outages.One of the strategies often adopted by firms to cope with this poor public supply is investment in backup generation. This strategy is not without cost however. Extant literatures on outage cost...

This study explores and quantifies the benefits of connecting more distributed generation (with and without the use of smart connections) across different parties (Distribution Network Operators, wider society and generators). Different connection scenarios are proposed (with partial and full...

We explore the different competitive mechanisms applied by electric utilities from the USA in promoting cost-effective Distribution Generation (DG) resources and the challenges that they face due to the increase in DG connections. Case studies from California, Oregon, Colorado and New York are...

There is a public perception that electricity liberalisation is the major cause of recent electricity blackouts. This is reflected in the newspaper reporting of blackouts. By contrast, it was not listed as a cause in any official investigation reports. In this paper, we examine the common causes...

In recent years, a number of empirical studies and energy regulators have applied benchmarking techniques to measure the efficiency and performance of network utilities. An important issue has been the extent to which such results are influenced by contextual factors. Among these, weather...

Efficiency analysis of electricity distribution networks is often limited to technical or cost efficiency measures. However, some important non-tradable aspects of their service such as quality of service and network energy losses are generally not part of the analysis. A regulatory concern is...