Concerns about global climate change have substantially increased the likelihood that future policy will seek to minimize carbon dioxide emissions. As such, even today, electric utilities are making resource planning and investment decisions that consider the possible implications of these future carbon regulations. In this article, we examine the manner in which utilities assess the financial ...

conclusions although the two instruments were able to discriminate between various states, the values derived from these instruments were quite different. this distinction could have influenced the conclusions of an economic evaluation. further research is required to determine which instrument should be used in economic evaluations. results the mean and median eq-5d utility scores for the tota...

within the four questions. Respondents were willing to sacrifice median 5 and 8 years of their remaining lifespan until the age of 80 years for avoiding two migraines per month and per week, respectively. Mean utilities for two migraines each month were U20m= 0.84 (SD 0.26) and U80m= 0.89 (SD 0.14), and for each week were U20w= 0.79 (SD 0.27) and U80w= 0.83 (SD 0.17), respectively. Self-reporte...

During the past few years, the scope and nature of resource planning at electric utilities has changed dramatically. The scope ofplanning has expanded to consider energy efficiency and load management programmes as resources, the en vironmental costs of electricity production, and a variety of resource-selection criteria beyond elec tricity price. The nature of planning has ex panded to include...

Patient preferences for health can be assessed and expressed in quantitative terms known as health state utilities. In this epidemiological study, we demonstrate the importance of dermatological problems for health state utilities. A cross-sectional survey including 5,404 individuals aged 20-84 years was conducted in the County of Uppland, Sweden. Information on dermatological problems and use ...

A project to assess the levels of leakage in 30 water utilities throughout South Africa was initiated by the Water Research Commission. The BENCHLEAK software was used to evaluate the water utilities and performance indicators calculated by the model were used to compare levels of non-revenue water. Results showed that utilities ranked differently according to the different indicators, and that...

In this paper we estimate an average-cost function for a panel of 45 Swiss electricity distribution utilities as a basis for yardstick regulation of the distribution-network access prices. Unlike the existing literature, we separate the electricity sales function of utilities from the network operation function. Several exogenous variables measuring the heterogeneity of the service areas were i...

To date most studies on the robustness of operat ing system software have focused on Unix based sys tems This paper develops a methodology and ar chitecture for performing intelligent black box analy sis of software that runs on the Windows NT plat form The goals of the research are three fold rst to develop intelligent robustness testing techniques for Commercial O The Shelf COTS software seco...

Smart grid enhances optimization in generation, distribution and consumption of the electricity by integrating information and communication technologies into the grid. Today, utilities are moving towards smart grid applications, most common one being deployment of smart meters in advanced metering infrastructure, and the first technical challenge they face is the huge volume of data generated ...

Introduction During the pioneering days of the electric utility industry, it was believed that utilities were natural monopolies, meaning that one utility could service a geographic area more cheaply than any combination of smaller utilities. More recently, the economic viability of transferring or wheeling electricity over long distances, the development of small-scale generators and efficient...