Electric utilities are increasingly aware of the potential of IT and its impacts on their business operation. However, in order for a utility to be able to translate all these potentials into real benefits, an IT strategy is needed to manage the developments, acquisitions, and the utilization of IT systems within the organization. Today, quite a few electric utilities have prepared or are in th...

We investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption. We construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away from factor coordination. We then exploit a unique dataset comprising firm-level information on 80 electricity distribution firms from 13 Latin American countri...

Historically, utilities have been granted a natural monopoly status through the regulatory process. Under such conditions, utilities need to prove to their regulators that their expenditures were necessary to comply with imposed "obligation to serve." When these prudency arguments are successful, the utilities may recover their costs plus a rate of return. Some have argued that this structure h...

This paper proposes a multi-criteria approach to handle emergency orders under real-time conditions in electric power distribution utilities. It is described how the problem related to serve work orders in electric utilities is considered, with an aggregated objective function developed to handle the minimization of the waiting time for emergency services, the total distance travelled and the s...

America’s electricity generation industry has historically been almost entirely dependent on the burning of coal. This necessity to burn coal so as to provide vital energy for our nation will likely continue for several decades into the future. Due to the large volumes of ash generated by the burning of coal and the toxins associated with coal ash, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ...

FOREWORD The bylaws of the National Regulatory Research Institute state that among the purposes of the Institute is: ... to carry out research and related activities directed to the needs of state regulatory commissioners, to assist the state commissions with developing innovative solutions to state regulatory problems, and to address regulatory issues of national concern. This study· the third...

We discuss a portfolio optimization problem occurring in the energy market. Energy distributing public services have to decide how much of the requested energy demand has to be produced in their own power plant, and which complementary amount has to be bought from the spot market and from load following contracts. This problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem and impl...

2 the output of " utility scale " DERs (> one megawatt). In addition, existing industry standards define advanced functions for DER only at the individual device level, and lack the more aggregated, feeder-level representations that are needed for enterprise integration. This white paper describes ongoing research at the Electric Power Research Institute that is exploring Various ways in which ...

Demand response Allows the management of customer consumption of electricity in response to supply conditions. Distributed generation Electric energy that is distributed to the grid from many decentralized locations, such as from wind farms and solar panel installations. Distribution grid The part of the grid dedicated to delivering electric energy directly to residential, commercial, and indus...