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...

Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries but is generally not reflected in efficiency analysis. In this paper we present an efficiency analysis of electricity distribution networks using a sample of about 500 electricity distribution...

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...

Due to a shortage of data and increased international mergers, national energy regulators are looking to international benchmarking analyses for help in setting price controls within incentive regulation. We present an international benchmarking study of 63 regional electricity distribution...

Incentive regulation for networks has been an important part of the reform agenda in a number of countries. As part of this regulatory process, incentives are put in place to improve the cost efficiency of network companies by rewarding good performance relative to a predefined benchmark. The...

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...

The requirement for significantly higher electricity network investment in the UK seems certain as the capacity of distributed generation and large scale renewables increases on the system. In this paper, which forms a chapter in the forthcoming Book “Delivering a Low Carbon Electricity...

International comparisons can be used to study relative efficiency of decision-making units in an industry in a wider context. In particular, cross-country comparisons can, help regulators of natural monopoly firms to assess the relative performance of their regulation regime and national firms...

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...