Utilities Policy最新文献

Energy poverty and financial literacy are two cross-cutting vital dimensions in sustainable global development. This study examines whether and how financial literacy reduces energy poverty at the household level in China. A two-way fixed regression model demonstrates the catalytic role of financial literacy in eradicating energy poverty. Furthermore, this study identifies potential mechanisms between financial literacy and energy poverty from a mediation and moderation perspective. Financial literacy indirectly and robustly mitigates energy poverty by heightening households' future expectations. However, higher financial risk weakens this facilitating effect on households’ future expectations, as increased financial risk destabilizes household finances.

Water utilities face the challenge of transitioning to a low-carbon urban water cycle while reducing operational costs. This study evaluates the static and dynamic carbon efficiency of a sample of water companies from 2013 to 2018 operating in England and Wales. Each company was evaluated relative to itself and its peers using cross-efficiency Data Envelopment Analysis techniques. The results showed that the carbon performance of the water industry improved by 2.1% per year, mainly due to efficiency change. In contrast, the contribution of factors driving technical and scale change was almost negligible.

Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR) Cooperation is a European effort to integrate several countries in an integrated international electricity market platform for FCR procurement. In this market, Balancing Service Providers (BSPs) are on the supply side and Transmission System Operators (TSOs) on the demand side. This paper proposes a novel settlement scheme for sharing costs among TSOs; it proposes no changes to existing market clearing rules or to the existing settlement of the BSPs’ revenues. It is shown that the current TSO settlement scheme is an inequitable mechanism that originates negative costs for some TSOs in specific conditions, which are extensively discussed. The proposed TSO settlement scheme overcomes these inequities. In the proposed scheme, TSOs begin paying the local BSPs for the cleared bids needed locally, and the remaining imports are calculated in a subsequent step. Doing so avoids using the so-called “import/export costs”, which are demonstrated to be the source of the inequities in the current scheme. It is shown that if the proposed pricing scheme had been adopted from July 2019 to December 2022, all TSOs would have been affected. Specifically, the most negatively impacted TSO would have its accumulated costs increased by 16% and the most positively impacted TSO would have its accumulated cost decreased by 32%. The inequities of the current mechanism amount to more than 50 M€ or 7.4% of the total accumulated costs. Although the proposed mechanism is tested here under the FCR Cooperation, it can be applied to other markets where the rules allow different local settlement prices.

This study evaluates the economic value and supports infrastructure development of constructing a circular network to improve natural gas supply stability. This study applies a double-bounded dichotomous choice model and shows that households and commercial users are willing to pay an additional 2.97% and 1.19% of their monthly gas bill, respectively. This study also shows the impact of gas supply understanding and population density on willingness to pay (WTP) for both sectors. Scenario analysis is conducted to analyze the cost-benefit ratio for a hypothetical region, which may be useful in setting up new business plans.

Nigeria's 2009 environmental regulatory policy began to restrict illegal household trash disposal, introducing trash bins in many, but far from all, areas. This paper uses national household-level data to estimate the immediate effects of the national policy and geographically heterogeneous facility improvement. The largest increase in the share of households opting for sustainable disposal occurred in “emerging areas” that historically lacked trash bins but began to introduce them under the new policy. In areas without facility improvement but were otherwise comparable to emerging areas, the policy alone failed to enhance the share of households choosing the use of contained dumpsites.

The main aim of this paper is to determine the impact of financial inclusion on energy poverty alleviation. It also interrogates whether institutional quality and climate change risk significantly influence the financial inclusion-energy poverty alleviation link using balanced panel data from 34 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2004 to 2021. Evidence from Discroll-Kraay Fixed Effects and Two-Step Instrumental Variable Generalized Method of Moments (2SIV-GMM) depicts heterogeneous energy poverty-alleviating impact of financial inclusion, demonstrating that financial inclusion is more instrumental in lower-income than lower-middle-income countries. Also, the results indicate a significant positive moderating role of institutional quality and a detrimental effect of climate change risk on financial inclusion-energy poverty alleviation nexus. Nevertheless, Dynamic Panel Threshold Regression results reveal threshold effects of financial inclusion, institutional quality, and climate change risk on energy poverty alleviation. The paper professes that financial regulations in allocating green resources would aid in alleviating energy poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The efficient management of assets delivers value and is essential for achieving service objectives, managing risks, and reducing costs. This paper proposes decision-support methods to help capital-intensive industries manage their assets and optimise their life cycle. Optimisation approaches were developed to support long-term investment planning by maximising the value created and minimising the budget used. Also, the trade-off for both objectives was analysed. Using the proposed models will lead to efficient management of available capital and excellent service delivery. Thus, water companies will fulfil the regulator’s requirements and present well-founded decision-making. This study was applied to a Portuguese water utility.

Effective planning and regulatory processes ensure orderly energy systems. Often, decisions are not made within mandated timeframes and discrete approval processes are infrequent. A given delay may be compounded where multiple approval processes exist in sequence. These factors can negatively affect system costs and, ultimately, consumer welfare. We show that delays have meaningful impacts on electricity prices, system emissions, infrastructure investment and system operating costs. Our numerical simulation of data from Ireland shows that wholesale electricity prices are up to 10% higher and CO₂ emissions up to 4% higher, attributable to delays associated with planning and regulatory approvals.

In rural areas in the Philippines, ensuring access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable electricity falls mainly to electric cooperatives (ECs). While this electrification model proved successful in the United States, developing countries with weak political competition and institutions may allow rent-seeking behavior in the sector. This paper examines the politico-economic determinants of EC performance in the Philippines and finds that lower political competition within an EC franchise area is associated with poor collection efficiency and larger employee size. The study points to the need for greater regulatory scrutiny among EC franchise areas with weak political competition. It also provides insights on facilitating progress towards attaining sustainable development goals and energy transition in developing countries with similar institutional endowments.

The rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) worldwide has raised concerns about and exacerbated the undersupply of charging infrastructure (CI), highlighting an urgent need for policy support. However, there is a lack of critical research that conducts a post-implementation evaluation for the CI-related policies, considering various goals and objectives of stakeholders. Thus, the study fills the void by applying the multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA), which aims to assess CI-related policies based on stakeholder perspectives. We selected Tianjin, China, as a case study and collected data from two focus groups and one semi-structured interview across the city’s six central districts. As revealed by the empirical evidence, the interviewed stakeholders favor subsidies in terms of their welfare, followed by electricity adjustments. The EV incentives, multi-operation mechanisms, and supportive urban planning rank lower but are still supported by the stakeholders, while supportive land use and policy advocacy are opposed. We also identified that the stakeholders’ concerns are varied, where the CI operation department prioritizes operating profit and costs, the government focuses on electricity safety, and the end-user group is concerned with all criteria except profit. Implications for future policy and practice were also discussed. This research can enrich the collaborative governance model (CGM) by incorporating policy evaluation and feedback.