The electricity supply industry is highly capital-intensive, whose success depends critically upon the management of its investment. In most developing countries investment is poorly managed, poorly maintained, and often inadequate. Inadequate regulation or political control lead to low prices...

Modern infrastructure, particularly electricity, is critical to economic development. South Asia, with inefficient and bankrupt state-owned vertically integrated electricity supply industries, encouraged private generation investment to address shortages selling power to largely unreformed state...

State-owned electricity companies typically set prices that are too low to finance new investment when needed, and which create additional problems where private investment is sought. The paper asks to what extent this can be attributed to historic cost accounting, and finds that provided the...

Following the liberalisation of the electricity industry since the early 1990s, many sector regulators have recognised the potential for cost efficiency improvement in the networks through incentive regulation aided by benchmarking and productivity analysis. This approach has often resulted in...

Incentive regulation needs to adapt to the emerging changes in the operating environment of the electricity networks and take into account the security of these. This paper assesses the current issues and options in economic regulation of network security across the European electricity systems....

The incentive regulation of costs related to physical and cyber security in electricity networks is an important but relatively unexplored and ambiguous issue. These costs can be part of a cost efficiency benchmarking or alternatively dealt separately. This paper discusses the issues and...

Since the early 1980’s, many countries have implemented electricity sector reform, many of which have bundled generation, transmission, distribution and supply activities, and have introduced competition in generation and supply. An increasing number of countries are also adopting incentive...

Quality of service has emerged as an important issue in post-reform regulation of electricity distribution networks. Regulators have employed partial incentive schemes to promote cost saving, investment efficiency, and service quality. This paper presents a quality-incorporated benchmarking...

The European Commission proposed to reform the Electricity and Gas Directives to improve access to transmission, increase cross-border capacity, and fully open the electricity and gas markets. The California electricity crisis has weakened support for liberalisation, removed the commitment to...

Europe is liberalising electricity in accordance with the European Commission’s Electricity Directives. Different countries have responded differently, notably in the extent of restructuring, treatment of mergers, market power, and vertical unbundling. While Britain and Norway have achieved...