This paper examines a life-cycle cost concept that applies to both manufacturing and service industries in which upfront capacity investments are essential. Borrowing from the energy literature, we refer to this cost measure as the levelized product cost (LC). Per unit of output, the levelized...

For fossil fuel power plants to be built in the future, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies offer the potential for significant reductions in CO2 emissions. We examine the break-even value for CCS adoptions, that is, the critical value in the charge for CO2 emissions that would justify...

New solar Photovoltaic (PV) installations have grown globally at a rapid pace in recent years. We provide a comprehensive assessment of the cost competitiveness of this electric power source. Based on data available for the second half of 2011, we conclude that utility-scale PV installations are...

We analyze a policy proposal for regulating the next generation of baseload electricity generation facilities in the United States. The cornerstone of this regulation is a (hypothetical) EPA mandate for an emission standard of 80kg of CO2 per MWh of electricity generated. The mandate would go...

This paper is concerned with the amount of communication that must be provided to implement a performance standard by a mechanism whose stationary messages have the Nash property. In p articular, the authors study implementation of Walrasian allocations in exchange environments. They show that...

In bilateral trading problems, the parties may be hesitant to make relationship-specific investments without adequate contractual protection. The authors postulate that the parties can sign noncontingent contracts prior to investing and can freely renegotiate them after information about the...

An important characteristic of most renewable energy sources is intermittency in their ability to generate electricity. Yet, intermittency is usually ignored in life-cycle cost calculations intended to assess the competitiveness of electric power from renewable as opposed to dispatchable energy...