This thesis focus on the free rider problem, well known in the field of economics. It is an unwanted situation that gives rise to unnecessary deadweight costs. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the free rider problem that occur when rent include housing utilities and especially when electricity is billed collectively. A Difference-in-Differences design has been applied on two different sets of panel data covering tenants electricity consumption. The results show that tenants use 21.3 percent more electricity when not paying directly for their own electricity consumption. This thesis also shed some light on different components of this problem. The findings in this thesis contributes to the limited research in this field with new empirical evidence.

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As the share of renewable and intermittent energy sources grow and as society becomes more electrified, electricity price volatility becomes one of the most pressing issues. The flexibility of household demand, when faced with price shocks, determines how exposed they will be to price volatility, making the estimation of their short-run price elasticity highly relevant for policymakers. The elasticity was estimated for the hourly demand, the daily demand, and the weekly demand using a difference in difference setup. All estimated elasticities were between -0.10 and -0.19, with the elasticity of hourly demand being the smallest and the elasticity of weekly demand being largest. This implies that household demand is very inelastic but grows in the longer run, even when the longer run is rather short. The elasticity differs between electricity pricing areas. The largest estimated elasticity was in the area which experienced the greatest price shock.

2023 / The increasing incidence and intensity of days and spells of extreme heat is expected to continue with climate change, with interconnected and cascading consequences across multiple scales and sectors. In particular, high temperature exposures directly affect population health (e.g., increased risk of hospitalization and death) and cooling energy demand (i.e., the use of residential air conditioning (AC) as adaptation). Heat extremes are often amplified in urban areas due to the thermodynamic properties of the built environment. While we have a strong understanding of the relationship between heat and energy demand, energy and AC, and the impacts of heat on morbidity and mortality, there remain notable knowledge gaps in the dynamics that underpin these relationships, and only a handful of studies are able to explore their linkages together, especially at fine spatial scales. In this dissertation, I combine econometric and epidemiological methods to provide further insights into several dimensions of the intersection of heat, electricity, AC, and health in urban populations, and holistically assess these linked relationships together. In my first chapter, I characterize the response of urban electricity demand to temperature at fine temporal resolution across a subset of world cities, and quantify the impacts of future heat adaptation on net and peak energy demand under mid-century warming. Temperature-demand response functions and future demand impacts are heterogeneous across temperate and tropical cities, highlighting the important role that the structure of electricity demand plays alongside distributional temperature shifts in evaluating the impacts of climate change on future energy demand. In my second chapter, I construct fine spatial resolution estimates of any residential AC across a large set of US metropolitan areas. Inter-urban availability of AC exhibits a strong latitudinal gradient, while intra-urban AC is systematically unequally distributed within cities. This inequality is also negatively correlated with social vulnerability (SVI) and surface urban heat island intensity (SUHI), suggesting that differential AC compounds existing heat health disparities. In my third chapter, I additionally compute individual and ZCTA-level estimates of AC use on extreme heat days alongside individual probability of AC in California cities, and evaluate the differences in the moderating effects of these related attributes of heat vulnerability on heat-related hospital admissions. AC prevalence and AC use are correlated, but both measures of adaptation are only weakly correlated with social vulnerability within cities. The spatial distribution of health risks from extreme heat echoes spatial patterns of increasing social vulnerability, and both AC prevalence and use significantly modify the association between extreme heat and a number of health outcomes. However, effect estimates differ between AC prevalence and AC use, suggesting that AC ownership does not necessarily reflect AC usage, and, crucially, that there remain additional unobserved dynamics driving the heat-adaptation-health relationship. Identifying the underlying factors and determinants of population heat health vulnerability at the local scales in which impacts and adaptation decisions take place is necessary as cities and municipalities develop and refine heat resilience policies and climate adaptation strategies aimed at reducing heat health inequities and improving community well-being.

This thesis estimates the quarterly electricity demand of Turkey. First of all proper seasonal time series model are found for the variables: electricity demand, temperature, gross domestic product and electricity price. After the right seasonal time series model are found Hylleberg, Engle, Granger and Yoo (1990) test is applied to each variable. The results of the test show that seasonal unit roots exist for the electricity price even it cannot be seen at the graph. The other variables have no seasonal unit roots when the proper seasonal time series model is chosen. Later, the cointegration is tested by looking at the vector autoregressive model. As the cointegration is seen vector error correction model is found. There is long-run equilibrium when the price is the dependent variable and independent variable is gross domestic product. Temperature is taken as exogenous variable and demand is not statistically significant.

This thesis analyzes the application of functional link-net (FLN) method in forecasting electricity demand in Turkey. Current official forecasting model (MAED), which is employed by Turkish Electricity Transmission Company (TEiAS) and other methods are discussed. An emprical investigation and evaluation of using functional link nets is provided.

This thesis consists of four essays, mainly related to the fields of industrial organization and political economy. The focus is on deregulation of electricity retail markets and on the continued regulation of parts of such markets after the introduction of competition. The first essay is an empirical essay on the causes of deregulation. The timing of implementation of competition in retail electricity markets in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand is studied. One conclusion is that there exist important qualitative differences between the United States and Europe. While deregulation in the United States to a large extent seems to have been driven by consumer interest concerns, the influence from interest groups is more pronounced in Europe.The second (theoretical) and third (empirical) essays deal with the interaction between the regulation of distribution networks and the retail market. When the regulated and unregulated operations are conducted within vertically integrated companies the regulation may not only have an effect on the regulated market, but also affect the behavior in the unregulated market. In the third essay a test that uses prices to detect patterns of cross-subsidization is developed and used on Norwegian data. Especially the effects of a regulatory change on cross-subsidization behavior are analyzed. The results both highlight the importance of a well-designed regulation of the regulated market and give support to requirements of vertical separation between regulated and unregulated operations.The fourth essay is a study of domestic electricity demand. It is thus somewhat different than the other papers since it is not directly connected to the issue of electricity market deregulation. Since the energy sector is an essential part of any modern economy and energy production has considerable environmental effects, the sector has for a long time been subject to political interventions. To some extent the policy instruments available to the legislator are reduced by deregulations. The use of taxes to affect prices and thus the demand for electricity may at the same time become an even more important policy instrument and more difficult to implement due to the internationalization of the electricity market. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2003

This thesis presents models that describe the behaviour of electricity demand and ambient temperature. Important features of both variables are described by mathematical components. These models were developed to calculate the value of electricity demand that is not expected to be exceeded more than once in ten years and to generate synthetic sequences that can be used as input data in simulation software. / PhD Doctorate

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>

Many buildings built in the 1960s are inefficient when it comes to their energy use. A lot of them are also in need of renovating. Therefore, this project is aiming to investigate five different scenarios where the decrease in electricity demand is in focus.One scenario is energy-saving behavior which does not need any investment for a renovation but just decreases the electricity demand by changing the behavior of the people living there.Another option is the building envelope renovation where added insulation to the outer walls, the roof and the floor is added. The windows and entrance doors are also upgraded to more efficient options. A return air only ventilation system is installed as well. The third option is to renovate the reference house to achieve the status of passive house set by Boverket. This is done by adding a much thicker layer of insulation to the building components and adding a FTX ventilation system and at the same time changing the direct electric heating system to a bed rock geothermal heating system. The last two scenarios, net-zero energy building and off-grid building, also use a FTX ventilation system and bed rock geothermal heating system. They have the same thickness as the building envelope renovation. The biggest difference is that the net-zero energy building uses solar power to match the yearly electricity demand and therefore be able to call it net-zero energy. The off-grid house has an electricity storage as well as the solar panels. This is to be able to disconnect from the electric grid completely and only consume electricity produced by the building itself.The last three scenarios all achieve a primary energy below that of what Boverket demand fornew buildings of 90 kWh/m^2, year. The building with the lowest cumulative cost over 50 years is the off-grid building, though this result could vary depending on the price of electricity. The scenario with the lowest investment cost per kWh saved is the net-zero energy building.