This thesis deals with issues related to investments and regulation of high-voltage electricity grids, and to the households’ demand for electricity. The thesis consists of four self-contained papers. Papers I and II address the challenge of reaching agreements on the expansions of electricity grid infrastructure across national borders. Agreements can be problematic to reach due to regional welfare-effects from new infrastructure, which leads to questions of how investment costs should be shared and under what circumstances cooperation will be rational for all nations. This relates to both the allocation rule used, and the number of countries involved in the sharing (e.g., bilateral or regional). These issues are analysed by game theoretic methods and a numerical optimisation model of the electricity systems of six European countries. Results show that proportional sharing of investment costs in relation to benefits is the most practical solution, and that it also gives outcomes in terms of welfare and transmission capacity that are very close to the regional welfare optimum.The utilities responsible for the transmission system operation and the grid development are the national Transmission System Operators (TSO). The TSOs are monopoly utilities that operate under regulatory oversight. The absence of competition in this sector means that regulators have an important role in monitoring performance and ensuring overall efficiency. One way to do this is by frontier benchmarking methods. However, there are in general no national comparators for TSO, which means that performance needs to be measured against international comparators. Paper III applies a benchmark model to analyse the technical efficiency of 29 European TSO. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to estimate efficiency scores and different approaches to account for the heterogeneity in operating environments are tested. Results show that the average technical efficiency is between 88% and 94%, depending on model and data sample. While this indicates that there are efficiency differences between the TSOs, the extension to regulation of TSOs is not straight forward since the reasons for inefficiency may be due to factors that are outside the TSO’s control.In Paper IV attention is turned towards the households’ demand for electricity. The question answered is how the ageing populations in OECD countries, and the consequential changes in population age-structures, may affect the residential demand for electricity. The implications of changing demography is analysed by a family life-cycle model, and an empirical analysis is made by specifying an econometric model of electricity demand that includes the population age-structure by four age-group variables. Results show that the oldest age-group has the largest positive effect on aggregate per capita consumption, while the other groups have lower but similar effects. The results have implications for projections of future electricity demand and for policies aimed at influencing households’ electricity demand, not the least since the share of elderly in the populations of western societies will increase by several percentage points over the coming decades. / <p>Godkänd; 2013; 20130809 (hannyl); Tillkännagivande disputation 2013-09-06 Nedanstående person kommer att disputera för avläggande av filosofie doktorsexamen. Namn: Hans Nylund Ämne: Nationalekonomi Avhandling: Electricity Across Borders: Regional Cost Sharing of Grid Investments, International Benchmarking and the Electricity Demand of an Ageing Population Opponent: Professor Andreas Stephan, Jönköping International Business School Ordförande: Professor Robert Lundmark, Luleå tekniska universitet Tid: Fredag den 27 september 2013, kl. 13.00 Plats: A109, Luleå tekniska universitet</p>

Pays en développement avec une demande d’électricité croissante, le Vietnam a instauré la tarification progressive de l’électricité résidentielle. La fixation du tarif de l’énergie est toujours une question délicate, entre gestion de la demande, lutte contre la pauvreté, effets sur l’inflation, besoins d’investissement pour assurer la sécurité énergétique et le développement des technologies vertes. Cette action nécessite une maîtrise très profonde du comportement des consommateurs ainsi que la demande des ménages. La thèse a pour but d’explorer les facteurs qui impactent la demande d’électricité Vietnamienne au niveau résidentielle en se basant sur : les prix, les revenus, la démographie (comprenant la taille et la composition des foyers) et les vagues de chaleur. Les données de « pool et panel » sont collectées à partir des trois micro enquêtes sur le niveau de vie des foyers vietnamiens en 2012, 2014, 2016.Cette thèse estime économétriquement la demande d’électricité des ménages. Elle innove sur deux points de méthode.Premièrement, elle utilise les données individuelles issues des enquêtes nationales, avec le détail de la structure des tarifs et des factures d’électricité des ménages répondants. Cela dépasse donc les limites de beaucoup de recherches passées qui étaient basées soit sur données nationales agrégées, soit sur données individuelles mais avec une quantité et un prix imputés, soit sur données individuelles avec le détail de la structure des tarifs et des factures d’électricité mais au niveau régional seulement. Cette innovation est possible car le marché de l’électricité au Vietnamien est monopolistique, avec un seul vendeur – Electricité de Vietnam (EVN), à qui le gouvernement commande d’utiliser une grille tarifaire homogène pour tout le pays.Deuxièmement, la thèse propose une nouvelle façon d’explorer l’impact des hautes températures sur la demande d’électricité. La méthode propose d’ajouter une variable muette qui représente l’occurrence d’une vague de chaleur. Cette variable est complémentaire de la notion « Degrés-jours de refroidissement » qui représente la température dans la plupart des études précédentes.Les conclusions principales sont que: (i) Les ménages réagissent aux prix marginaux, la demande est élastique par rapport au prix. (ii) Il existe un seuil de revenu à partir duquel la consommation d'électricité des foyers augmente quand le revenu augmente : la consommation d'électricité des foyers ayant ce revenu peut être considérée comme le niveau de besoin fondamental, un seuil de pauvreté pour l’électricité. (iii) La progressivité de la tarification ne pénalise pas les familles nombreuses : le tarif progresse moins vite que les d’économies d'échelle des dépenses d'électricité. (iv) Nous n’observons pas d’effet de la composition du foyer en termes enfants / adultes / personnes âgés sur la dépense d'électricité. (v) Les vagues de chaleur - un phénomène lié au changement climatique - impactent la demande d’électricité et devraient être mieux prises en compte dans l’estimation de la demande. / As a developing country with surging demand in electricity, Vietnam has implemented demand-side management in the residential electricity market, such as increasing block tariffs to balance the tension between energy security and the development of clean technology. The implementation of demand-side management requires a deep understanding of customer behaviors and household demand. The thesis aims to explore the factors impacting on Vietnamese residential electricity demand in the period of 2012–16. The exploration focuses on four main factors: prices, income, demographics (including household size and composition), and heatwaves. The data are a pool data set and a panel data set which have been constructed from the three rounds of the micro survey Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) in 2012, 2014 and 2016.The thesis has two novel points in estimating household electricity demand function.First, it uses micro survey data at national level, with detailed tariff structures and private electricity billing. In the past, researches have often used national aggregate data or national micro survey data with imputed quantity or price. Researches that use micro survey data with detail tariff schedules and electricity bills are often at a regional level rather than at a national level due to the absence of national data on tariff structures. The residential electricity market in Vietnam is a monopoly with a single seller, Vietnam Electricity (EVN). Electricity tariff schedules are proposed by EVN and set by the Government and are thus uniform in national scale. This provides a chance to estimate demand function from national micro survey data, with full detail of electricity prices and billings.Second, the thesis proposes a new way to capture the impact of high temperature on electricity demand. That is, to include an additional dummy variable to represent the extreme distribution of temperature. The additional dummy variable is a complement to the concept of cooling degree days which is a popular representation of temperature in previous researches.The estimate results lead to five main conclusions. (i) Households do respond to marginal prices and demand is elastic to price. (ii) There exists an income threshold from which household electricity consumption increases as income increases. The electricity consumption of households in the income group is the reference level of electricity poverty threshold. (iii) The increasing block tariff does not cancel out economies of scale in electricity expenditure of households. (iv) There is no difference in electricity expenditure across children, adults and elders. (v) Heatwaves – a climate change related phenomenon – do have impacts on electricity demand and need to be addressed carefully in estimating electricity demand in the future.