Maintenance costs in deregulated power systems play an important role. This mainly includes direct costs associated with material and labor costs; and indirect costs associated with spare parts inventory, shipment, test equipment cost, indirect labor, and opportunity costs. The cost function is used as the sole or main component of the objective function in maintenance scheduling and planning activities. The cost has been modeled in literature with several representations for centralized power systems. With deregulation of power industries in many countries the costs representation to be used within the maintenance model in the decentralized power systems has become an important research question. This paper presents modeling of different components of maintenance costs that can be used within the main objective function of the maintenance scheduling and planning problem for the deregulated environment.

<p> </p><p> </p><p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p></p><p><p>The thesis will provide a description of the previous Swedish NRT marketing mix, a description of the present plans of Swedish NRT marketers for the marketing mix of their products, and the present marketing mix of the previously deregulated pharmacy markets in Finland and Norway. The purpose is to develop conclusions on how marketers of NRT products could change their marketing mix in response to the deregulation of the Swedish pharmacy market. </p><p> </p><p>This thesis relies on a descriptive method. Interviews are used as the source of primary data. This is because some of the information sought after is not readily available and cannot be found through secondary data.</p></p><p>Markets are mature only in the minds of the actors on the market. Due to the deregulation the market seems to be a window of opportunity for any innovative, aggressive marketing entrepreneur who wants to radically change his or her position in the market. NRT marketers could attempt to design a new, more aggressive strategy and work with the remaining Ps to unhinge what seems to be regarded a mature market. NRT marketers should work more actively to create an effective market feedback loop. NRT marketers should consider using the Internet to sell their products to consumers, thus opening a new channel.</p>

The thesis will provide a description of the previous Swedish NRT marketing mix, a description of the present plans of Swedish NRT marketers for the marketing mix of their products, and the present marketing mix of the previously deregulated pharmacy markets in Finland and Norway. The purpose is to develop conclusions on how marketers of NRT products could change their marketing mix in response to the deregulation of the Swedish pharmacy market.    This thesis relies on a descriptive method. Interviews are used as the source of primary data. This is because some of the information sought after is not readily available and cannot be found through secondary data. Markets are mature only in the minds of the actors on the market. Due to the deregulation the market seems to be a window of opportunity for any innovative, aggressive marketing entrepreneur who wants to radically change his or her position in the market. NRT marketers could attempt to design a new, more aggressive strategy and work with the remaining Ps to unhinge what seems to be regarded a mature market. NRT marketers should work more actively to create an effective market feedback loop. NRT marketers should consider using the Internet to sell their products to consumers, thus opening a new channel.

The electric power industry is undergoing a restructuring process. The major goals of the change of the industry structure are to motivate competition, reduce costs and improve the service quality for consumers. In the meantime, it is also important for the new structure to maintain system reliability. Power system reliability is comprised of two basic components, adequacy and security. In terms of the time frame, power system reliability can mean short-term reliability or long-term reliability. Short-term reliability is more a security issue while long-term reliability focuses more on the issue of adequacy. This dissertation presents techniques to address some security issues associated with short-term reliability and some adequacy issues related to long-term reliability in deregulated power systems. Short-term reliability is for operational purposes and is mainly concerned with security. Thus the way energy is dispatched and the actions the system operator takes to remedy an insecure system state such as transmission congestion are important to shortterm reliability. Our studies on short-term reliability are therefore focused on these two aspects. We first investigate the formulation of the auction-based dispatch by the law of supply and demand. Then we develop efficient algorithms to solve the auction-based dispatch with different types of bidding functions. Finally we propose a new Optimal Power Flow (OPF) method based on sensitivity factors and the technique of aggregation to manage congestion, which results from the auction-based dispatch. The algorithms and the new OPF method proposed here are much faster and more efficient than the conventional algorithms and methods. With regard to long-term reliability, the major issues are adequacy and its improvement. Our research thus is focused on these two aspects. First, we develop a probabilistic methodology to assess composite power system long-term reliability with both adequacy and security included by using the sequential Monte Carlo simulation method. We then investigate new ways to improve composite power system adequacy in the long-term. Specifically, we propose to use Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) such as Thyristor Controlled Series Capacitor (TCSC), Static Var Compensator (SVC) and Thyristor Controlled Phase Angle Regulator (TCPAR) to enhance reliability.

A higher share of renewable energy in power generation is one of most ambitious goals for sustainable development under the increasing pressure of climate change. On the deregulated electricity market in Sweden, the consumers are able to choose their electricity from a specific supplier and a specific energy source, which gives them the opportunity to execute their consumer power to have positive impacts on increasing energy efficiency and renewable electricity generation by stopping buying electricity produced from fossil fuels. A new paradigm is thus proposed in this paper which provides a new perspective on purchase of the product electricity. The new paradigm makes electricity a specified product for a specific customer, the electricity audited is never mixed with that not audited, because all electricity which is audited can be traced. The aim of this study is to provide a greater understanding of the new paradigm on the deregulated electricity market. By conducting a willingness to pay survey and several deep interviews, it analyzed the main factors hindering the customers’understanding of the new market dynamics in terms of active choice in ‘green’ electricity and stopping buying fossil electricity. The results and discussions show that the new paradigm could facilitate shedding light on some important implications for strategic decision making in power companies, for policy-makers as well as customers.

Traditionally, the electricity industry is fully regulated with a centrally controlled structure. The power system operator has full technical and costing information as well as a full control over the operation and maintenance of power system equipment. Recently, many countries have gone through privatization of their electricity industries unbundling the integrated power system into a number of separate deregulated business entities. The preventive maintenance of power system equipment in the restructured electricity industries is no longer controlled centrally, and none of these entities currently have explicit accountability for maintenance activities. The approaches used to schedule the maintenance activities in the centralized system are not ideal for addressing the new deregulated environments. In recent years a few research publications has been reported in this area. This paper presents a review and analysis of these reported maintenance scheduling approaches for power system equipment in the changed environment.

A common electricity market in Europe will in all probability lead to a levelling out of the electricity price, which implies that Swedish consumers will face higher electricity prices with a European structure. This new market situation will force industry and energy suppliers to take new essential measures as actors in a deregulated European electricity market. In this thesis it is shown how over 30 Swedish small and medium-sized industries can reduce their use of electricity by about 50%. When scaling up the result to include all Swedish industry, the measures will lead to a significant reduction in global CO2 emissions, and a situation where Sweden will have a net export of electricity. Changing industrial energy use towards increased use of district heating will consequently affect the local energy suppliers. As a local energy supplier invests in CHP and co-operates on heat with an industry that has altered its energy use, the system cost will be halved. Considering higher European electricity prices, the benefits will be even higher with possibilities to reduce global emission with over 350%. In Sweden where district heating is very well established, heat driven absorption technology is especially favourable since it will lead to cost effective electricity production and increased utilization time for a CHP plant. Vapour compression chillers have been compared with heat driven absorption cooling for a local energy utility with a district cooling network and for industries in a Swedish municipality with CHP. The results show that the higher the share of absorption technology is, in comparison to compression chillers, the lower the production cost will be for producing cooling. This thesis illustrates measures for Swedish industry and energy suppliers in a fully deregulated European electricity market that will shift the energy systems in the direction of cost-effectiveness and resource effectiveness. The thesis also shows that the benefits of the measures will increase even more when accounting with electricity prices with a higher European structures. To methodically change the use of electricity would be an economical way to increase the competitiveness of Swedish plant in relation to other European plants. Taking advantage of these particularly Swedish conditions will contribute to the creation of lean resource systems, and as a result help the whole EU region to meet its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. Altering industrial energy use towards less electricity and energy dependence will be a competitive alternative to new electricity production and help secure energy supply in the European Union.

The objective of the study is to analyse the conditions for connection of residential buildings in heat sparse areas to district heating systems in order to increase electricity production in municipal combined heat and power plants. The European electricity market has been assumed to be fully deregulated. The relation between connection of heat sparse areas, increased electricity and heat production as well as electricity prices, fuel prices and emissions rights is investigated. The results of the study show that there is potential to expand the district heating market to areas with lower heat concentrations in the cities of Gavle, Sandviken and Borlange in Sweden, with both economic and environmental benefits. The expansion provides a substantial heat demand of approximately 181 GWh/year, which results in an electricity power production of approximately 43 GWh/year. Since the detached and stand-alone houses in the studied heat sparse areas have been heated either by oil boiler or by direct electricity, connection to district heating also provides a substantial reduction in emissions of CO2. The largest reductions in CO2 emissions are found to be 211 ktonnes/year assuming coal-fired condensing power as marginal electricity production. Connection of heat sparse areas to district heating decrease the system costs and provide a profitability by approximately 22 million EURO/year for the studied municipalities if the price of electricity is at a European level, i.e. 110 EURO/MWh. Sensitivity analysis shows, among other things, that a strong relation exists between the price of electricity and the profitability of connecting heat sparse areas to district heating systems. / Original Publication:Shahnaz Amiri and Bahram Moshfegh, Possibilities and consequences of deregulation of the European electricity market for connection of heat sparse areas to district heating systems, 2010, Applied Energy, (87), 7, 2401-2410.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2010.02.002Copyright: Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam.http://www.elsevier.com/

Under deregulated electric market, electricity price is no longer set by the monopoly utility company rather it responds to the market and operating conditions. Offering the right amount of electricity at the right time with the right bidding price has become the key for utility companies pursuing maximum profits under deregulated electricity market. Therefore, electricity market clearing price (MCP) forecasting became essential for decision making, scheduling and bidding strategy planning purposes. However, forecasting electricity MCP is a very difficult problem due to uncertainties associated with input variables.<p> Neural network based approach promises to be an effective forecasting tool in an environment with high degree of non-linearity and uncertainty. Although there are several techniques available for short-term MCP forecasting, very little has been done to do mid-term MCP forecasting. Two new artificial neural networks have been proposed and reported in this thesis that can be utilized to forecast mid-term daily peak and mid-term hourly electricity MCP. The proposed neural networks can simulate the electricity MCP with electricity hourly demand, electricity daily peak demand, natural gas price and precipitation as input variables. Two situations have been considered; electricity MCP forecasting under real deregulated electric market and electricity MCP forecasting under deregulated electric market with perfect competition. The PJM interconnect system has been utilized for numerical results. Techniques have been developed to overcome difficulties in training the neural network and improve the training results.

Under deregulated electric market, electricity price is no longer set by the monopoly utility company rather it responds to the market and operating conditions. Offering the right amount of electricity at the right time with the right bidding price has become the key for utility companies pursuing maximum profits under deregulated electricity market. Therefore, electricity market clearing price (MCP) forecasting became essential for decision making, scheduling and bidding strategy planning purposes. However, forecasting electricity MCP is a very difficult problem due to uncertainties associated with input variables.<p> Neural network based approach promises to be an effective forecasting tool in an environment with high degree of non-linearity and uncertainty. Although there are several techniques available for short-term MCP forecasting, very little has been done to do mid-term MCP forecasting. Two new artificial neural networks have been proposed and reported in this thesis that can be utilized to forecast mid-term daily peak and mid-term hourly electricity MCP. The proposed neural networks can simulate the electricity MCP with electricity hourly demand, electricity daily peak demand, natural gas price and precipitation as input variables. Two situations have been considered; electricity MCP forecasting under real deregulated electric market and electricity MCP forecasting under deregulated electric market with perfect competition. The PJM interconnect system has been utilized for numerical results. Techniques have been developed to overcome difficulties in training the neural network and improve the training results.