Since the 1970s, high volumetric (per kilowatt-hour) electricity prices have been justified in many policy discussions as encouraging more efficient use of electricity and placing more of the cost burden on those who are less prudent in their use. The argument has been used in support of...

Utility regulators frequently focus as much or more on the distributional impact of electric rate structures as on their efficiency. The goal of protecting low-income consumers has become more central with recent increases in wholesale power costs and anticipation of significant costs of...

One of the most critical concerns that customers have voiced in the debate over real-time retail electricity pricing is that they would be exposed to risk from fluctuations in their electricity cost. The concern seems to be that a customer could find itself consuming a large quantity of power on...

Adoption of real-time electricity pricing -- retail prices that vary hourly to reflect changing wholesale prices -- removes existing cross-subsidies to those customers that consume disproportionately more when wholesale prices are highest. If their losses are substantial, these customers are...

The standard economic model of efficient competitive markets relies on the ability of sellers to charge prices that vary as their costs change. Yet, there is no restructured electricity market in which most retail customers can be charged realtime prices (RTP), prices that can change as...

We study price convergence between the two major markets for wholesale electricity in California from their deregulation in April 1998 through November 2000, nearly the end of trading in one market. We would expect profit-maximizing traders to have eliminated persistent price differences between...

Effective competition in wholesale electricity markets is a necessary feature of a successful electricity supply industry restructuring. We examine the degree of competition in the California wholesale electricity market during the period June 1998 to September 1999 by comparing the market...

We use demand and plant-level cost data to simulate competition in a restructured California electricity market. This approach recognizes that firms might have an incentive to restrict output in order to raise price and enables us to explicitly analyze each firm's ability to do so. We find that,...

In an unregulated electricity generation market, the degree to which generators in" different locations compete with one another depends on the capacity to transmit electricity" between the locations. We study the impact of transmission capacity on competition among" generators. We show that...

Prior to the 1990s, most electricity customers in the U.S. were served by regulated, vertically-integrated, monopoly utilities that handled electricity generation, transmission, local distribution and billing/collections. Regulators set retail electricity prices to allow the utility to recover...