The electricity industry in most developed countries has been restructured over recent decades with the aim of improving both service quality and firms’ performance. Regulated segments (e.g. transmission) still provide the infrastructure for the competitive segments and represent a notable...

The main aim of this paper is to develop an econometric approach to the estimation of marginal costs of improving quality of service. Estimating marginal costs of quality can help energy regulators to design more effective incentive mechanisms for network utilities to achieve optimal quality...

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

The energy market liberalisation process in Europe is increasingly focused on electricity market integration and related cross border issues. This signals that the liberalisation of national electricity markets is now closer to the long-term objective of a single European energy market. The...

Since the early 1990s, substantial resources and efforts have been spent on implementing market-oriented electricity reforms in developing countries. While there are important sectoral, economic, and social dimensions involved in electricity reform, empirical analysis and evaluation of reforms...

In recent years, the security of energy supplies has re-emerged as a central issue in the energy policy arena in the UK and elsewhere. This re-emergence takes place against a backdrop of increased liberalisation of the energy markets, so that security of supply needs to be revisited within this...

This paper is a critical assessment of the current balance of efforts towards energy research and development (R&D) and the promotion of low-carbon electricity technologies in the UK. We review the UK's main technological options and their estimated cost ranges in the medium term. We contrast...