This effort represents a contribution to the wider distributed energy resources (DER) research of the Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS, http://certs.lbl.gov) that is intended to attack and, hopefully, resolve the technical barriers to DER adoption, particularly...

California's restructured electricity markets opened on 1 April 1998. The former investor-owned utilities were functionally divided into generation, transmission, and distribution activities, all of their gas-fired generating capacity was divested, and the retail market was opened to...

This paper examines a California-based microgrid?s decision to invest in a distributed generation (DG) unit fuelled by natural gas. While the long-term natural gas generation cost is stochastic, we initially assume that the microgrid may purchase electricity at a fixed retail rate from its...

Today's U.S. energy efficiency services industry is one of the most successful examples of private sector energy efficiency services in the world, yet little empirical information is available on the actual market activity of this industry. LBNL, together with the National Association of Energy...

The U.S. Energy Services Company (ESCO) industry is often cited as the most successful model for the private sector delivery of energy-efficiency services. This study documents actual performance of the ESCO industry in order to provide policymakers and investors with objective information and...

This article summarizes a comprehensive empirical analysis of U.S. Energy Service Company (ESCO) industry trends and performance. We employ two parallel analytical approaches: a comprehensive survey of firms to estimate total industry size and a database of {approx}1500 ESCO projects, from which...

For at least the last decade, evaluation of the benefits of research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RD3) by the U.S. Department of Energy has been conducted using deterministic forecasts that unrealistically presume we can precisely foresee our future 10, 25,or even 50 years hence....

The physical nature of electricity generation and deliverycreates special problems for the design of efficient markets, notably theneed to manage delivery in real time and the volatile congestion andassociated costs that result. Proposals for the operation of thederegulated electricity industry...