Electricity is indispensable and of strategic importance to national economies. Consequently, electric utilities make an effort to balance power generation and demand in order to offer a good service at a competitive price. For this purpose, these utilities need electric load forecasts to be as accurate as possible. However, electric load depends on many factors (day of the week, month of the y...

Figure 1. Reduction in variance after MPC is applied. M odel-based predictive control (MPC) is a valuable, proven advanced process control (APC) approach that has been used for some time, especially in the chemical and hydrocarbon processing industries. It has been underutilized until recently in the power industry, and in that segment, MPC is now also showing dramatic results. The strength of ...

The battle for electricity customers in an increasingly competitive and deregulated market environment is one of the challenges facing the electric power utilities of today. Customers expect a reliable and efficient supply of power from their utilities. One of the advantages that a distributed generator (DG) can provide to the electric utility and to customers is the possibility of improving th...

For a solar power plant, storing energy enables utilities to generate power when and as required and not just when sun is shining. There are two popular ways to convert solar energy to electricity – solar photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal. In a solar PV plant sun’s energy is directly converted to electric energy using solar cells and therefore it requires a battery to store electric energy. A...

a r t i c l e i n f o The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, which is owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), on the stock prices of the other electric power utilities in Japan. Because the other utilities were not directly damaged by the Fukushima nuclear accident, their stock price responses should reflect the ...