<p>Wind and solar generation are intermittent generation sources. System integration costs include the costs of spinning reserves, increased transmission costs and storage costs. The overarching research problem examines evaluation of different policies that lead to high penetration of intermittent renewable electricity sources. The first research question examined the emissions reduction benefits and system integration costs of policy mandates for high penetration of intermittent renewable electricity technologies for Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). The second research question examines the total systems costs of mandates for renewable electricity generation and a carbon tax using a TIMES model for MISO. The third research question examined the emissions and costs of policy mandates for high penetration of wind and solar electricity generation technologies for MISO when short-term operational constraints are considered. TIMES minimizes the total system cost subject to constraints of capacity activity, commodity use, satisfying demand, and peaking reserve. The US EPA 9 region model contains end use technologies for commercial, industrial, residential and transport sectors. The technologies that do not serve end use demands with electricity have been removed. The number of time slices which are the time divisions of the year was increased to 288 to help capture wind and solar generation dynamics at higher levels of penetration and help better understand spinning reserves requirements and costs. Based on the candidate sites for solar and wind generation, the costs include expected transmission costs, and any investment and production costs specific to the candidate sites costs.</p> <p>The results show that as the level of the mandate for wind and solar generation increases, their costs increased. Emissions saving from the mandates were converted to reductions in the Social Costs of Emissions (SCE) (See Section 2.4.4 for the definition) to compare system cost to with the savings in SCE. The savings in the SCE increase as the level of the mandate increases. However, the savings in SCE do not justify the system cost increases associated with the mandates. </p> <p>The carbon tax and mandate policies implemented held the overall emission reductions constant where a 35% reduction of CO2e emissions from 2020 levels by 2050 in compared to the reference scenario. The carbon tax (Policy I) had the lower of Levelized Marginal Cost of Electricity (LMCOE) (discounted value of generation for a year based on the generation weighted Marginal Cost of Electricity), while the mandate (Policy II) had the higher of LMCOE. Similarly, Policy I had the lowest of discounted total system cost and Policy II had higher discounted total system cost. </p> <p>The cost to society is underestimated when short-term operational constraints are ignored. The addition of short-term operational constraints led to increased total systems cost and greater emissions savings as the level of the mandate increased. Adding short-term operating constraints also gives a more complete understating of CO2e emissions savings for the different scenarios as there is a decrease in coal generation and increase in natural gas generation led to increased CO2e emissions savings. The addition of short-term operational constraints shows on one hand the impact of the policy and on the other hand the consequences of not including some of the cost realities.</p>

The Ontario Tories' 42-year hegemony in government (1943-1985) was wrought through clever policies which often utilized Crown institutions to promote prosperity or to oblige or mollify vying interests. Ousted in 1985, though, they used their time in opposition to revise the Tory doctrine. In the 1995 election, the Tories emerged a tougher, more truculent group quite unlike their predecessors. Campaigning on their Common Sense Revolution (CSR) platform, they promised to eliminate red tape and vowed to obliterate all ostensible economic barriers which were impeding commerce in the province. In the CSR, the Tories identified Ontario Hydro (OH), the province's lauded publicly-owned power monopoly, as a troublesome and inefficient Crown entity which required fundamental reform. Portions of OH, they hinted, would likely be sold. Once elected, the Tories worked hurriedly to demolish OH and destroy public power in Ontario. For nearly 100 years, OH proved a pivotal component within the province's political economy for its provision of affordable, reliable power and its function as a policy tool to incite and direct development. A Tory government fought to instigate public power in the early 1900s and, in the late 1900s, a Tory government was fighting vigorously to rescind it. Why would they now renounce Crown power? It is the intent of this thesis to elucidate the Tory government's involvement in the transformation of Ontario's electricity industry from 1995 to 2003. Distinguishing electricity as a special, strategic staple, this thesis uses a pro-state, pro-staples industry political economy approach to discern how and why the Tory government sought to restructure the electricity sector. Essentially, it posits that the onslaught of neoliberalism, the emergence of novel generating technology, and the faltering of OH's nuclear wing all had a huge part to play in provoking the Tory government to initiate its reforms. Their reforms, though, proved too hasty, haughty, and fraught with ambiguity to work properly. While their open, competitive power market and attempts to privatize Hydro One failed horribly, the Tories' energy re-regulation strategy did hold promise to allow the state to retain a prominent role in the power industry. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2007-08-27 23:05:37.549

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How has the Indian state changed with economic liberalization? While many scholars have explored the altered party politics and class basis of the liberalization-era state, few have studied its transforming internal organizational forms and functioning. This thesis aims to provide an empirically grounded answer to this question. To do this it uses the lens of electricity: the sector lies at the heart of contemporary capital accumulation, state power, and distributive politics, and has witnessed almost a quarter-century of institutional reforms since 1991. In the sector, new or reworked organizational forms—such as imported regulatory agencies, corporatized state-owned enterprises, and public-private partnerships—have been grafted onto the older statist system in a process of institutional layering. Favouring state-business collaboration and prioritizing rapid economic growth, this mode of state operation is distinct both from a liberal, market-oriented state and from India’s older state-led mode. It combines state intervention and selective adoption of parts of the Washington Consensus template to produce a reinvented mode of power governance that I term state capitalism 2.0. India’s new state-market hybrid is not a functional alternative to the older models, however. The layered process through which it has emerged means that it is distinctively dysfunctional. Organizations have emerged in an ad hoc fashion, each shaped and reshaped by multiple collective interests, while existing organizations are rarely destroyed. The resulting layered amalgam institutionalizes contradictory state strategies, co-optation by competing interest groups, and a dualistic system of services and subsidies. Consequently the sector’s performance remains poor. As a result, developments in the Indian power sector suggest that the state's 'pro-business' transition has been painful and incomplete. At least in this sector, the Indian state remains simultaneously more indispensable, more ambivalently pro-business, and more chaotic than much theory might suggest.

Africa’s quest for economic development will require the increased availability and use of its abundant energy resources. Nevertheless, most of its rural population remains without access to modern energy services and urban residents typically only enjoy an intermittent supply of electricity. The dominant approach to energy planning in West Africa is top-down and centralized, emphasizing electricity generation from large dams or fossil-fueled plants and subsequent grid extension to reach more customers. However, an alternative and complementary paradigm is that of decentralized or Distributed Generation (DG), which stresses small-scale, on-site generation of power and offers a bottom-up approach to energy development. The goal of this dissertation project is to assess the various options for regional electrification and integration through a holistic analysis of the set of existing technologies and policies for deploying them. The main organ of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for regional electricity planning is the West African Power Pool (WAPP) and its primary policy document, the “Master Plan”, addresses regional power supply shortage through centralized planning. Both the WAPP policy documents and the majority of the country-level planning documents are considered to be based on a traditional, empiricist, policy analysis that appears to provide value-neutral solutions and generalizations. In contrast, the analysis provided in this project situates itself within the post-positivistic, deliberative and more contextual approach to policy analysis in order to compare the centralized approach to generation with a distributed approach, which is currently marginal in the region. It uses the Adaptive Management (AM) framework for this analysis, particularly because of the way it deals with ecological resilience in the face of widespread uncertainty. The main policy issue that this project seeks to address is the need for an integrated energy-environment planning process, which is currently lacking in West Africa, so as to achieve long term sustainability. Adaptive management offers policy makers a holistic lens with which to view energy policy, but there are very few examples of institutions that have attempted to implement it in practice anywhere in the world. These instances, however, represent a valuable historical reference point for future policy research and management efforts that seek to explore this approach. In alignment with that objective, this dissertation first provides an overview of the concept of adaptive management in general, and its application to energy problems in particular. Secondly, the research project undertakes a policy analysis of the ECOWAS strategy for electrification, based on a stakeholder analysis, a review of life cycle assessments of existing energy technologies, the expected outcomes of the electricity sector, and a set of traditional criteria for evaluating public policies. In order to further examine the question of electricity access, it carries out a quantitative analysis of the electricity demand and supply in the region. It uses a modeling approach that is based on the logic of AM to determine whether or not the energy requirements for broad based electrification can be met through distributed renewable power, which is currently a negligible component of the generation resource portfolio in West Africa. The dissertation proceeds to carry out a retrospective analysis of three cases in the U.S. where elements of AM have already been applied to energy planning in order to investigate some of the critical determinants for its successful implementation to date. This assessment then informs a prospective analysis of three West African cases that have ideal characteristics for experimentation with AM to determine to what extent similar concepts have been used, or may be employed in the future. The AM framework also calls for the consideration of local values, which should be open to revision in the face of real situations. To this end, the prospective analysis includes three additional place-sensitive criteria, so as to ensure that the framework remains viable in a different socio-political context. The AM analyses are then extended to include a discussion of learning and innovation in clean energy technologies, drawing from the Chinese, Danish and South African experiences. The results suggest that a strong and consistent political will that is in alignment with an explicit social policy is needed to initiate and implement broad-based electrification plans, but that stakeholder participation is critical to their success. In addition, the adoption of multiple instruments and the selection of a diverse range of energy resources were found to be more effective than an overreliance on a single dominant scheme so as to allow room for policy learning. Furthermore, the results confirm that a holistic approach to managing ecosystems associated with electric power production is a fruitful way to integrate ecological considerations with social and economic factors throughout the development of a project. This type of systemic methodology should also include the building of technological capability and the development of innovation capacity in order to address the unique socio-economic context and the rapidly-changing climatic conditions in West Africa. Finally, the articulation of a planning philosophy that engages the values and sensibilities of the people in a particular place, and that is rooted in them, was found to be a critical factor for increasing the level of public participation in management activities in order to achieve more equitable and democratic outcomes.

This dissertation assesses the evolving structure and performance of the electricity supply industry (ESI) in Queensland following the restructuring and deregulation process undertaken in 1997 and 1998 respectively. This microeconomic reform process essentially replaced a vertically integrated electricity monopoly with an oligopolistic electricity market. In theory at least, restructuring a monopoly generator, and deregulating the product and capacity markets, should lead to lower electricity production costs, more cost-reflective wholesale electricity prices, and a generation plant expansion path that reflects the least-cost, optimal mix of baseload, intermediate and peaking technologies. In economic terms, the deregulated electricity market should deliver improvements in productive, allocative and dynamic efficiency. However, a likely side effect is a deterioration of ESI environmental performance, since the minimization of production costs are of paramount importance in a competitive market. This research has utilized historic data, direct comparisons to southern market outcomes, economic theory and the development and adaptation of a suite of economic cost and generation system simulation models to test the stated hypotheses of expected improvements in productive, allocative and dynamic efficiency, and a deterioration in environmental performance. This research has not had the availability of extensive historical market data upon which to draw. When research first commenced, less than six months of historical market data were available. At the time of completion of this dissertation, only three full financial years of data existed. Consequently, this research necessarily relied upon complex simulation models of economic cost and electricity generation systems, coupled with economic theory, to forecast market outcomes. The short history of market data is examined and tentative conclusions are drawn from this, which are integrated with the outputs of the simulation models. Simulation experiments have been conducted to identify the theoretically optimal market outcome, that is, the least-cost generation plant mix that would best meet the Queensland load curve, subject to a reliability constraint. This forms the 'base case', and represents that which would reasonably be expected to emerge under a centrally planned monopoly regime with a welfare maximization objective, characterised by perfect information and zero political intervention. Such a scenario establishes efficient generation system costs, prices and plant capacity mix. The 'base case' or centrally planned scenario is contrasted with forecast 'market scenarios'. Performance of the generation system is explored under specified scenarios using the economic cost and generation system simulation models, publicly available information about committed and expected future investment in plant capacity, incumbent generator trends and behavioural assumptions consistent with oligopolistic market theories. The analysis indicates that productive efficiency, or cost efficiency, is enhanced as a result of restructuring the monopoly generator into competing entities since competitive pressures force the generators to reduce costs in order to survive. Allocative efficiency, or price efficiency, declined during the first three years of the market, with all generators earning positive economic rents. The presence of these economic rents, coupled with conventional oligopolistic strategies associated with the theory of barriers to entry, resulted in a rush to commission new baseload capacity. Not surprisingly, dynamic efficiency appears to be deteriorating, with the market-induced capacity augmentation proving to be far greater than that considered optimal. Modelling results indicate that the oversupply of baseload capacity is expected to place considerable downward pressure on electricity prices, and thus allocative efficiency is forecast to improve in the intermediate run, much to the benefit of electricity consumers. In the long run, the oversupply of baseload capacity and subsequent low market price can be expected to frustrate the timely entry of new peaking or intermediate plant capacity, which will ultimately be required by the Queensland ESI given the strong electricity demand growth. What does appear to be emerging is a five or seven year electricity generation business cycle. Modelling results from this research also point to alarming environmental implications, with the general levels of greenhouse gas emissions of the electricity system increasing. While system thermal efficiency is declining, the rush of new, low-cost coal-fired capacity represents an inferior outcome to the alternative (i.e. efficient combined cycle gas plant) because the volume of greenhouse emissions is markedly higher. The outlook for Queensland's greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation, in the absence of coincident environmental policies, is that they will more than double between the 1990 emission baseline, and the commencement of the Kyoto commitment period in 2008. Some clear warnings emerge from this research. The structure and performance of an ESI prior to deregulation is important if microeconomic reforms are to be successful. Too little generation capacity or transmission capacity is unlikely to provide a robust foundation for wholesale market implementation. To ensure that adequate competition will prevail, it will be necessary to restructure monopoly generators. The existing ESI needs to be characterised by ‘inefficiency’ if gains from trade are to be capitalized. An efficient centrally planned ESI is unlikely to benefit greatly from deregulation, particularly given that implementing a product market is likely to be a costly process. And finally, competitive markets deliver lowest cost, which is usually inconsistent with the most environmentally responsible outcome. As a result, if the environment is considered a policy imperative, it will be critical that ESI deregulation be complemented by coincident environmental regulations.