balancing terrorism and natural disasters defensive strategy with endogenous attacker effort in this paper we apply game theory to identify equilibrium strategies for both attacker and defender in a fully endogenous model of resource allocation for countering terrorism and natural disasters the key features of our model include balancing protection from terrorism and natural disasters and describing the attacker choice by a continuous level of effort rather than a discrete choice i e attack or not interestingly in a sequential game increased defensive investment can lead an attacker to either increase his level of effort to help compensate for the reduced probability of damage from an attack or decrease his level of effort because attacking has become less profitable this can either reduce or increase the effectiveness of investments in protection from intentional attack and can therefore affect the relative desirability of investing in protection from natural disasters

capacity constraints and cycles in property casualty insurance markets underwriting cycles are unexpected in a structurally competitive industry where financial capital is the major determinant of output capacity arbitrage theories explain underwriting cycles as largely an artifact of institutional lags and reporting practices capacity constraint theories view insurance markets as characterized by real frictions that cause underwriting cycles by temporarily reducing the industry s capacity to insure risks arbitrage theories imply nofsystematic relationship between capacity and underwriting margins while capacity constraint hypotheses predict a negative relationship this article provides a test of the two theories by examining the empirical relationship between casacity and underwriting margins the results using data on four insurance lines generally support the capacity constraint hypothesis unanticipated decreases in capacity cause higher profitability and prices

practical operation strategies for pumped hydroelectric energy storage phes utilising electricity price arbitrage abstract in this paper three practical operation strategies 24optimal 24prognostic and 24hsitrocial are compared to the optimum profit feasible for a phes facility with a 360 mw pump 300 mw turbine and a 2 gwh storage utilising price arbitrage on 13 electricity spot markets the results indicate that almost all 97 of the profits can be obtained by a phes facility when it is optimised using the 24optimal strategy developed which optimises the energy storage based on the day ahead electricity prices however to maximise profits with the 24optimal strategy the day ahead electricity prices must be the actual prices which the phes facility is charged or the phes operator must have very accurate price predictions otherwise the predicted profit could be significantly reduced and even become a loss finally using the 24optimal strategy the phes profit can surpass the annual investment repayments required however over the 5 year period investigated 2005 2009 the annual profit from the phes facility varied by more than 50 on five out of six electricity markets considered considering the 40 year lifetime of phes even with low investment costs a low interest rate and a suitable electricity market phes is a risky investment without a more predictable profit

the logic of institutional preferences german electoral law as a social choice outcome institutions determine the results of social decision processes yet institutions are themselves endogenous products of earlier social choices this paper explores the hypothesis that participants in the choice of institutions seek alternatives that favor their desired policies the choice of institutions can be analyzed in terms of bargaining between individuals or parties where preferences derive from preferences over policy and bargaining is structured by existing institutions this approach is used to study the choice of an electoral system in germany after world war ii the hypothesis that parties choose electoral institutions to maximize their future policy influence explains both the adoption of proportional representation in 1949 and the switch to a two vote ballot in 1953

leadership and politics a perspective from the growth commission the paper attempts via case studies to illustrate the nature and importance of political structures and transitions in the course of rapid growth and development the cases are drawn principally from asia where the pattern has often been a dominant single party structure evolving into a full multi party democratic structure this results from the interaction of the politics and changes that result from the growth process itself such as the emergence of politically active middle and entrepreneurial classes the role of political leadership in managing sequencing and pacing these transitions is discussed we do not yet have a general model for which these cases would be instances the hope is that an in depth understanding of the case dynamics will be a useful input to the development and testing of more general theories copyright 2009 oxford university press

on the benefits of behind the meter rooftop solar and energy storage the importance of retail rate design abstract we investigate the impact of retail rate design on the investment incentives avoided utility costs and cost shifting concerns associated with rooftop solar plus battery storage systems that are located behind the meter to illustrate these interactions we consider recently proposed changes to california s time of use pricing policy for commercial and industrial consumers which shifts on peak prices from midday to the constrained evening hours we find that these rate adjustments reduce cost shifting concerns across consumers considerably but also decreases solar pv investment and has an ambiguous effect on storage investment we demonstrate that storage reduces utility costs but the magnitude of this effect varies critically with the prevailing retail rate structure importantly we show that a shift in the on peak period to the constrained evening hours does not always elevate the avoided cost associated with a battery system when demand charges are imposed on a consumer s private maximum demand we illustrate that this issue can be alleviated by imposing demand charges on consumption that arises in system constrained hours we find that while storage reduces the utility s costs it can also increase cost shifting concerns these findings demonstrate the potential trade offs between maximizing avoided costs and minimizing cost shifting concerns under commonly employed retail rate structures

why market rules matter optimizing pumped hydroelectric storage when compensation rules differ abstract policies markets and technologies interact to create the modern electrical system integrating large amounts of electricity generated by variable renewable resources such as from wind and sunlight into electricity systems may require energy storage technologies to synchronize electricity production with electricity demand electricity markets compensate the performance of these energy storage technologies for the services they provide and these markets are often operated by regional independent system operators isos that specify the market rules for this compensation to examine how different iso rules can affect the operation and profitability an energy storage technology we develop a dynamic programming model of pumped hydroelectric storage phes facility operation under the market rules from the midcontinent iso and iso new england we present how differences in rules between these isos produced different operational strategies and profits and how important they are for phes profitability

optimal operation of pumped hydro storage plants with continuous time varying power prices abstract pumped hydro storage plants are increasingly considered as a complement to intermittent renewable energy sources hence a profound understanding of their underlying economics gains in importance to this end we derive efficient operation programs for storage plants which operate in an environment with time varying but deterministic power prices optimal control theory thereby provides a consistent framework for analysis in continuous time taking into account the different specifics of pumped hydro setups with large not restricting and small restricting reservoirs an empirical illustration discusses storage operation in the german market showing that the profit potential for storage plants decreased significantly between 2008 and 2011 affecting both large and small reservoir plants

economic reform and public opinion in peru 1990 1995 even if they are confident that prosperity lies just over the horizon politicians who embark on promarket reforms know they are in for some stormy weather how will they fare in voters eyes once the pain is felt will voters inevitably turn against politicians who impose painful measures without an electoral mandate to do so the story of economic reform and public opinion in peru under alberto fujimori 1990 1995 poses just these questions the author uses monthly public opinion polls and monthly economic data to analyze the impact of economic changes during fujimori s reform program on opinions of the reforms and the president the author finds that limenos withdrew support from the program and the president when employment fell and inflation rose responses consistent with the findings of the economic voting literature but when real wages fell they became optimistic about the future and more likely to support reforms and the government

measuring positive externalities from unobservable victim precaution an empirical analysis of lojack lojack is a hidden radio transmitter device used for retrieving stolen vehicles because there is no external indication that lojack has been installed it does not directly affect the likelihood that a protected car will be stolen there may however be positive externalities due to general deterrence we find that the availability of lojack is associated with a sharp fall in auto theft rates of other crime do not change appreciably at least historically the marginal social benefit of an additional unit of lojack has been fifteen times greater than the marginal social cost in high crime areas those who install lojack however obtain less than 10 percent of the total social benefits leading to underprovision by the market

economic feasibility of stationary electrochemical storages for electric bill management applications the italian scenario battery energy storage systems besss are expected to become a fundamental element of the electricity infrastructure thanks to their ability to decouple generation and demand over time besss can also be used to store electricity during low price hours when the demand is low and to meet the demand during peak hours thus leading to savings for the consumer this work focuses on the economic viability of bess from the point of view of the electricity customer the analysis refers to a lithium ion li ion an advanced lead acid a zinc based a sodium sulphur nas and a flow battery the total investment and replacement costs are estimated in order to calculate the cumulated cash flow the net present value npv and the internal rate of return irr of the investment a parametric analysis is further carried out under two different assumptions a varying the difference between high and low electricity prices b varying the peak demand charges the analysis reveals that some electrochemical technologies are more suitable than others for electric bill management applications and that a profit for the customer can be reached only with a significant difference between high and low electricity prices or when high peak demand charges are applied

political scale and electoral turnout evidence from the less industrialized world this article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world it explo

the family and the state the immaturity of children sometimes precludes efficient arrangements between children and parents or others responsible for child care the difficulty in establishing efficient relations within families provides the point of departure for our interpretation of the heavy state involvement in the family the authors believe that a surprising number of state interventions mimic the agreements that would occur if children were capable of arranging for their care many regulations of the family improve the efficiency of family activities these interventions include subsidies to education and training social security and other old age support subsidies to births laws that limit access to divorce and the sale of children and laws that require parents permission for early marriage and other choices of children families that leave bequests can force children to repay parents for investments in human capital by reducing bequests therefore these families do not underinvest in childrens human capital by contrast families that do not leave bequests often poorer families do underinvest in children the state may subsidize schools and other training facilities to raise investments in children by poorer families to efficient levels authors modified

government versus opposition at the polls how governing status affects the impact of policy positions we argue that governing status affects how voters react to extreme versus moderate policy positions being in government forces parties to compromise and to accept ideologically unappealing choices as the best among available alternatives steady exposure to government parties in this role and frequent policy compromise by governing parties lead voters to discount the positions of parties when they are in government hence government parties do better in elections when they offset this discounting by taking relatively extreme positions the relative absence of this discounting dynamic for opposition parties on the other hand means that they perform better by taking more moderate positions as the standard downsian model would predict we present evidence from national elections in germany the netherlands norway sweden and the united kingdom 1971 2005 to support this claim

substitution between unemployment insurance and workers compensation abstract this paper extends the literature on post injury duration of absence from work by developing a model that incorporates substitution between unemployment insurance benefits and workers compensation a theoretical analysis is presented in which the worker maximizes expected utility over four possible states of nature the model is tested empirically using pooled cross section and time series data at the two digit industry level the main findings support the predictions of the model an increase in workers compensation benefits increases the average duration of accidents with an elasticity of 0 9 1 4 while an increase in unemployment insurance payments reduces the average duration of accidents with an elasticity of 0 5 0 7

electricity trading and negative prices storage vs disposal electricity cannot yet be stored on a large scale but technological advances leading to cheaper and more efficient industrial batteries make grid level storage of electricity surpluses a natural choice because electricity prices can be negative it is unclear how the presence of negative prices might affect the storage policy structure known to be optimal when prices are only nonnegative or even how important it is to consider negative prices when managing an industrial battery for fast storage a storage facility that can both be fully emptied and filled up in one decision period we show analytically that negative prices can substantially alter the optimal storage policy structure e g all else being equal it can be optimal to empty an almost empty storage facility and fill up an almost full one for more typical slow grid level electricity storage we numerically establish that ignoring negative prices could result in a considerable loss of value when negative prices occur more than 5 of the t

financial storage rights should energy storage buy and sell power at wholesale prices like utilities and generators or should its physical and financial operation be asynchronyous as with transmission lines in the first case storage straightforwardly profits through intertemporal arbitrage also known as load shifting and peak shaving in this paper the latter case referred to as passive storage is examined because passive storage does not make nodal price transactions new mechanisms are necessary for its integration into electricity markets this issue is addressed by further developing the analogy between energy storage and transmission specifically financial rights are defined for storage and tracing is extended to multiperiod power flows linked by storage like flowgate transmission rights the new financial storage rights redistribute the system operator s merchandising surplus and enable risk averse market participants to hedge against nodal price volatility resulting from storage congestion simple examples are given demonstrating the implementation of the new mechanisms game theoretic analysis suggests that financial storage rights mitigate gaming when both the generator and load bid strategically

a statistical model for multiparty electoral data we propose an internally consistent and comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty district level aggregate election data this model can be used to explain or predict how the geographic distribution of electoral results depends upon economic conditions neighborhood ethnic compositions campaign spending and other features of the election campaign or characteristics of the aggregate areas we also provide several new graphical representations for help in data exploration model evaluation and substantive interpretation although the model applies more generally we use it to help resolve an important controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in great britain contrary to previous analyses which are all based on measures now known to be biased we demonstrate that the incumbency advantage is small but politically meaningful we also find that it differs substantially across the parties about half a percent for the conservatives 1 for the labor party and 3 for the liberal party and its successors also contrary to previous research we show that these effects have not grown in recent years finally we are able to estimate from which party each party s incumbency advantage is predominantly drawn

voter response to congressional campaigns new techniques for analyzing aggregate electoral behavior scholarship on congressional elections typically analyzes either the sum or the division of the major party vote at the district level our main innovation is to model the votes received by each candidate as a separate dependent variable utilizing statistical methods developed to analyze multiparty elections because we are dealing with a substantive area in which endogeneity problems are rampant we synthesize an instrumental variables approach with a compositional data model this approach allows one to study the mobilizing and persuasive effects of congressional campaigns at the aggregate level

can group incentives alleviate moral hazard the role of pro social preferences abstract incentivizing unobservable effort in risky environments such as in insurance credit and labor markets is vital as moral hazard may otherwise cause significant welfare losses including the outright failure of markets ensuring incentive compatibility through state contingent contracts between principal and agent however is undesirable for risk averse agents we provide a theoretical intuition on how pro social preferences between agents in a joint liability group contract can ensure incentive compatibility two independent large scale behavioral experiments framed in an insurance context support the hypotheses derived from our theory in particular effort decreases when making agents payoff less state dependent but this effect is mitigated with joint liability in a group scheme where agents are additionally motivated by pro social concerns activating strategic motives slightly increases effort further particularly in non anonymous groups with high network strength the results support existing evidence on joint liability groups and further suggest that even if peer pressure to ensure effort provision is absent such group policies can improve efficiency when agents are pro social

benchmarking across borders electoral accountability and the necessity of comparison when the economy in a single country contracts voters often punish the government when many economies contract voters turn against their governments much less frequently this suggests that the international context matters for the domestic vote yet most research on electoral accountability assumes that voters treat their national economies as autarkic we decompose two key economic aggregates growth in real gross domestic product and unemployment into their international and domestic components and demonstrate that voters hold incumbents more electorally accountable for the domestic than for the international component of growth voters in a wide variety of democracies benchmark national economic growth against that abroad punishing rewarding incumbents for national outcomes that underperform outperform an international comparison tests suggest that this effect arises not from highly informed voters making direct comparisons but from pre benchmarking by the media when reporting on the economy the effect of benchmarked growth exceeds that of aggregate national growth by up to a factor of two and outstrips the international component of growth by an even larger margin implying that previous research may have underestimated the strength of the economy on the vote

electricity price arbitrage with plug in hybrid electric vehicle gain or loss abstract customers utilities and society can gain many benefits from distributed energy resources ders including plug in hybrid electric vehicles phevs using battery on phev to arbitrage electricity price is one of the potential benefits to phev owners there is however disagreement on the magnitude of such profit this study uses a stochastic optimization model to estimate the potential profit from electricity price arbitrage of two types of phevs phev 10 and phev 40 under three scenarios with variant electricity tariff and phev owners over a five year period the simulation results indicate that under current market structure even with significant improvement in battery technologies e g higher efficiency lower cost the phev owners can t achieve a positive arbitrage profit this finding implies that expected arbitrage profit solely is not a viable option to engage phevs larger adoption subsidy and combining phev arbitraging with alternative phev services are required

technical and economical assessment of distributed electrochemical storages for load shifting applications an italian case study abstract time of use tou energy cost management involves the use of energy storage systems esss by customers to reduce their electricity bills the ess is charged during off peak time periods when electricity energy prices are low and discharged during times when on peak energy prices are applied this article addresses the question whether it is economically viable to install medium scale distributed esss designed to lower the electricity cost for a customer side application assuming flexible electricity tariffs the technical economical evaluation is carried out referring to lithium ion li ion sodium sulfur nas and vanadium redox battery vrb technologies performing a parametric analysis by changing the capital cost of the batteries and the difference between the maximum and minimum electricity price a case study is performed to show the advantages disadvantages of the proposed approach the analysis reveals that at the current costs of esss the use of batteries for tou applications is economically advantageous for a public institution facility in italy only if there is a significant difference between the maximum and the minimum electricity price the decrease in the cost of storage stimulated by the implementation of support policies will make ess even more convenient for load shifting applications

stochastic valuation of energy storage in wholesale power markets abstract energy storage systems are well poised to mitigate uncertainties of renewable generation outputs grid scale energy storage projects are major investments which call for rigorous valuation and risk analysis this paper provides a stochastic energy storage valuation framework in wholesale power markets which considers all key revenue streams simultaneously as part of this framework an operational optimization model is developed to determine the energy storage system s optimal dispatch sequences a future curve model is built to capture the volatilities of electricity prices in addition a frequency regulation service price forecasting model is developed simulation results with a realistic battery storage system reveal that the majority of the market revenues comes from frequency regulation services simulation results also show that both round trip efficiency and power to energy ratio are crucial to the cost effectiveness of energy storage systems

when politics and models collide estimating models of multiparty elections theory the spatial model of elections can better be represented by using conditional logit models which consider the position of the parties in issue spaces than by multinomial logit models which only consider the position of voters in the issue space the spatial model and random utility models in general suffer from a failure to adequately consider the substitutability of parties sharing similar or identical issue positions hypotheses multinomial logit is not necessarily better than successive applications of binomial logit conditional logit allows for considering more interesting political questions than does multinomial logit the spatial model may not correspond to voter decision making in multiple party settings multinomial probit allows for a relaxation of the iia condition and this should improve estimates of the effect of adding or removing parties methods comparisons of binomial logit multinomial logit conditional logit and multinomial probit on simulated data and survey data from multiparty elections results multinomial logit offers almost no benefits over binomial logit conditional logit is capable of examining movements by parties whereas multinomial logit is not multinomial probit performs better than conditional logit when considering the effects of altering the set of choices available to voters estimation of multinomial probit with more than three choices is feasible

the mechanical and psychological effects of electoral systems a quasi experimental study having two votes for the same election or two simultaneous elections with different electoral systems provides a golden opportunity to ascertain the impact of the electoral system and to sort out t

internet and politics evidence from u k local elections and local government policies we empirically study the effects of broadband internet diffusion on local election outcomes and on local government policies using rich data from the u k our analysis shows that the internet has displaced other media with greater news content i e radio and newspapers thereby decreasing voter turnout most notably among less educated and younger individuals in turn we find suggestive evidence that local government expenditures and taxes are lower in areas with greater broadband diffusion particularly expenditures targeted at less educated voters our findings are consistent with the idea that voters information plays a key role in determining electoral participation government policies and government size

the impact of electricity storage on wholesale electricity prices this paper analyzes the impact of electricity storage on the production cost of a power system and the marginal cost of electricity electricity price using a unit commitment model also real world data has been analyzed to verify the effect of storage operation on the electricity price using econometric techniques the unit commitment model found that the deployment of a storage system reduces the fuel cost of the power system but increases the average electricity price through its effect on the power system operation however the reduction in the production cost was found to be less than the increase in the consumer s cost of electricity resulting in a net increase in costs due to storage different storage and co2 price scenarios were investigated to study the sensitivity of these results the regression analysis supports the unit commitment results and finds that the presence of storage increases average wholesale electricity prices for the case study system

public support for economic reforms in poland using monthly surveys the author examines the impact of aggregate economic conditions on the dynamic of support for the polish program of economic reforms the balcerowicz plan to highlight the ambiguity of the standard retrospective model the author analyzes the impact of subjective perceptions of economic conditions on postures toward the reform program asking if people were extrapolating the past when forming predictions about the future then the effect of these predictions on the postures toward reform is studied finally the author focuses on the distributional effects substantive conclusions concerning the impact of economic conditions on the support of economic reform programs under democracy close the article

theoretical foundations and empirical evaluations of partisan fairness in district based democracies we clarify the theoretical foundations of partisan fairness standards for district based democratic electoral systems including essential assumptions and definitions not previously recognized formalized or in some cases even discussed we also offer extensive empirical evidence for assumptions with observable implications we cover partisan symmetry the most commonly accepted fairness standard and other perspectives throughout we follow a fundamental principle of statistical inference too often ignored in this literature defining the quantity of interest separately so its measures can be proven wrong evaluated and improved this enables us to prove which of the many newly proposed fairness measures are statistically appropriate and which are biased limited or not measures of the theoretical quantity they seek to estimate at all because real world redistricting and gerrymandering involve complicated politics with numerous participants and conflicting goals measures biased for partisan fairness sometimes still provide useful descriptions of other aspects of electoral systems

the shanghai effect do exports to china affect labor practices in africa summary to investigate whether africa s exports to china influence labor practices in africa we reconsider the debate over trade s influence on regulatory standards in exporting countries the first generation of trade regulation scholars asked whether high levels of exports influenced regulatory standards of exporting countries with inconclusive results the second generation of scholarship focused not on how much a country exported but to whom it exported identifying a california effect by which firms and consumers in mostly developed importing countries projected their high regulatory standards on less developed export partners structural change especially the rise of china as a major importer poses a challenge to these optimistic findings drawing on insights from the analysis of compositional data this paper introduces a third generation of trade regulation research which suggests examining not only with whom a country trades but also how the composition of markets in a country s export basket reshuffles over time specifically we explore the possibility of a shanghai effect whereby african countries begin to reflect the lower labor standards of china which has emerged as a major destination for their exports we show that when a country increases exports to china the net effect on domestic labor standards depends critically on the labor practices of other export destinations compositionally displaced by china exports our analysis of a panel of 49 african countries for the period 1985 2010 produces a small continent wide estimate of china s negative influence on african labor practices in sample simulation at the country level uncovers a moderate shanghai effect for a handful of countries only

arbitraging intraday wholesale energy market prices with aggregations of thermostatic loads we investigate the potential for aggregations of residential thermostatically controlled loads tcls such as air conditioners to arbitrage intraday wholesale electricity market prices via non disruptive load control we present two arbitrage approaches 1 a benchmark that gives us an optimal policy but requires local computation or real time communication and 2 an alternative based on a thermal energy storage model which relies on less computation communication infrastructure but is suboptimal we find that the alternative approach achieves around 60 80 of the optimal wholesale energy cost savings we use this approach to compute practical upper bounds for savings via arbitrage with air conditioners in california s intraday energy market we investigate six sites over four years and find that the savings range from 2 37 per tcl per year and depend upon outdoor temperature statistics and price volatility

why did the incumbency advantage in u s house elections grow theory a simple rational entry argument suggests that the value of incumbency consists not just of a direct effect reflecting the value of resources such as staff attached to legislative office but also of an indirect effect reflecting the fact that stronger challengers are less likely to contest incumbent held seats the indirect effect is the product of a scare off effect the ability of incumbents to scare off high quality challengers and a quality effect reflecting how much electoral advantage a party accrues when it has an experienced rather than an inexperienced candidate hypothesis the growth of the overall incumbency advantage was driven principally by increases in the quality effect methods we use a simple two equation model estimated by ordinary least squares regression to analyze u s house election data from 1948 to 1990 results most of the increase in the incumbency advantage at least down to 1980 came through increases in the quality effect i e the advantage to the incumbent party of having a low quality challenger this suggests that the task for those wishing to explain the growth in the vote denominated incumbency advantage is to explain why the quality effect grew it also suggests that resource based explanations of the growth in the incumbency advantage cannot provide a full explanation

estimating the value of electricity storage in pjm arbitrage and some welfare effects significant increases in prices and price volatility of natural gas and electricity have raised interest in the potential economic opportunities for electricity storage in this paper we analyze the arbitrage value of a price taking storage device in pjm during the six year period from 2002 to 2007 to understand the impact of fuel prices transmission constraints efficiency storage capacity and fuel mix the impact of load shifting for larger amounts of storage where reductions in arbitrage are offset by shifts in consumer and producer surplus as well as increases in social welfare from a variety of sources is also considered

climbing the ranks incumbency effects in party list systems abstract incumbents tend to have a solid electoral advantage in candidate centered electoral settings do similar incumbency effects exist in more party centered environments we estimate incumbency effects in an open list proportional representation system exploiting that seats are first allocated across parties and then to candidates within party lists using data from norwegian local elections 2003 2015 we document that a candidate that barely wins a seat in the local council has about a 9 percentage points 43 higher probability of being elected in the next election compared to a candidate that just misses out on a seat on the same party list we find no evidence that voters contribute to this personal incumbency advantage rather it seems as if party elites are instrumental in securing the electoral success of their party affiliates we show that incumbents and non incumbents run again in the subsequent election at about equal rates but that incumbents tend to advance in the party hierarchy and obtain safer ballot positions in future elections which is what ultimately leads to electoral success

dynamic pie a strategy for modeling trade offs in compositional variables over time the substance of politics involves competition that evolves over time while our theories about competition emphasize trade offs across multiple categories most empirical models tend to oversimplify them by considering trade offs between one category and everything else we propose a research strategy for testing theories about trade off relationships that shape dynamic compositional variables this approach improves current methods used to analyze compositional dependent variables by addressing two limitations first although scholars have considered compositional dependent variables they have done so in contexts that were not dynamic second current approaches toward graphical presentations become unwieldy when the compositional dependent variable has more than three categories we demonstrate the utility of our strategy to expand current theories of party support and political budgeting in both cases we can extend trade offs across pairs of alternatives e g prime minister versus all other parties or spending on defense versus everything else to competition across multiple alternatives

insurance self protection and the economics of terrorism abstract this paper investigates the rationale for public intervention in the terrorism insurance market it argues that government subsidies for terror insurance have the effect of discouraging self protection and limiting the negative externalities associated with self protection cautious self protective behavior by a target can hurt public goods like national prestige if it is seen as giving in to the terrorists and may increase the loss probabilities faced by others by encouraging terrorists to substitute toward more vulnerable targets we argue that these externalities in protection are essential for normative analysis of government intervention in insurance markets and may also explain why availability problems in this market have engendered much stronger government responses than similar problems in other catastrophe insurance markets

online adaptive real time optimal dispatch of privately owned energy storage systems using public domain electricity market prices this paper aims to evaluate and improve the usefulness of publicly available electricity market prices for real time optimal dispatching rtod of a privately owned energy storage system ess in a competitive electricity market the rtod algorithm seeks to maximize the revenue by exploiting arbitrage opportunities available due to the inter temporal variation of electricity prices in the day ahead market the pre dispatch prices issued by the ontario independent electricity system operator and the corresponding ex post hourly ontario energy prices are employed as the forecast and the actual prices a compressed air ess is sized and employed for evaluations due to its lower capital expenditure and its ability to be positively influenced by the availability of waste heat first the conventional rtod algorithm is developed by formulating a mixed integer linear programming problem it is demonstrated that the forecast inaccuracy of publicly available market prices significantly reduces the ess revenue then a new adaptive algorithm is proposed and evaluated which adapts the objective function of the optimization problem online based on historical market prices available before real time the outcomes reveal that the proposed adaptive rtod can significantly increase the ess revenue compared to the conventional algorithm as well as the back casting method proposed in prior studies

workers compensation moral hazard and the composition of workplace injuries this paper provides evidence that workers compensation insurance wc affects not only the occurrence but also the composition of reported injuries in our theoretical approach wc is the source of two interrelated moral hazard problems underprovision of accident preventing efforts by the insured worker ex ante moral hazard and false reporting of injuries ex post moral hazard our model predicts that under certain assumptions the impact of wc benefits is stronger on the probability of reporting a difficult to diagnose injury than on the probability of reporting an injury that is easy to diagnose panel data on 9 800 workers in the quebec construction industry over each month of the period 1977 86 combining administrative data from the quebec construction board with data from the quebec workers compensation board are used for the estimates the parameters of the model are estimated using a threealternative logit kernel hybrid multinomial probit mnp framework with individual random effects our results confirm our theoretical pre

the private and social economics of bulk electricity storage the ability to store excess intermittent renewable electricity is increasingly being seen as a key option for integrating large quantities of renewable capacity however intermittent energy sources currently account for very small amounts of total generation despite this fact policymakers have begun implementing requirements that will dramatically increase the amount of bulk storage capacity this paper examines the social benefits provided by bulk storage in the texas electricity market which has a large amount of renewable capacity relative to other states but still quite limited renewable penetration we focus on the impact of arbitraging electricity across time a major service of bulk storage using current storage technologies we demonstrate that electricity arbitrage will increase daily co2 emissions by an average of 0 19 tons for each mwh stored in addition daily so2 emissions will increase by an average of 1 89 pounds mwh while nox emissions will fall by an average of 0 15 pounds mwh

the role of smart metering and decentralized electricity storage for smart grids the importance of positive externalities because of its fluctuating nature the feed in of renewable energy sources into low voltage distribution grids complicates the balancing of demand and supply this carries the risk of grid instabilities causing damage to electronic devices and power outages which eventually lead to deadweight losses in principle the problems arising from fluctuating feed in can be solved by increasing demand elasticity or decoupling generation and consumption for the first an advanced metering infrastructure and for the second decentralized electricity storage are considered core enablers however to date the diffusion of these future smart grids core components is low the present study provides new insights for understanding and overcoming diffusion barriers for this purpose a qualitative research approach was chosen the most important stakeholders as well as related private costs and benefits are identified the findings show that both of these smart grid components are widely considered beneficial to society by experts however because the numerous private benefits are widely distributed among distinct players socially desired investments are hampered by positive externalities the importance of well designed and consistent regulatory and legal frameworks that provide economic incentives to involved stakeholders is highlighted in the results

optimal planning to include storage devices in power systems it is difficult to forecast renewable energy resources due to their variability high uncertainty of the resources increases the concern about the reliable operation of the electric power system storage devices have been considered a candidate to control variable energy resources and most studies on storage devices are performed in the economic dispatch therefore electric power adequacy may be an issue in this paper a new approach in the optimal power flow framework is proposed for deploying storage devices and the feasibility and economic impact analyses are discussed

voter uncertainty and failure of duverger s law an empirical analysis real world simple plurality elections rarely bear out the strong duvergerian prediction that in equilibrium only two competitors receive votes recent advances in strategic voting theory demonstrate that voter uncertainty about competitors true support levels in the constituency may lead to limited strategic voting and hence incomplete desertion of trailing parties this is the first attempt to estimate empirically the impact of uncertainty on incentives to vote strategically calibrating a model of strategic voting to voting results from simple plurality elections in german constituencies it is found that strategic voters operate under high levels of uncertainty these results support the proposition that uncertainty about party support impedes formation of duvergerian equilibria

is inexpensive natural gas hindering the grid energy storage industry abstract grid energy storage is a maturing technology and forecasts of the industry s growth have been promising however recent years have realized little growth in actual deployments of grid level storage and several high profile storage companies and projects have failed we hypothesize that falling natural gas prices have significantly reduced the potential profit from many u s energy storage projects since 2009 and quantify that effect we use engineering economic models to calculate the monthly revenue to energy storage devices providing frequency regulation and energy arbitrage in several electricity markets and compare that revenue to prevailing natural gas prices we find that flywheel devices providing frequency regulation were profitable in months when natural gas prices were above 7 mcf but face difficulties at current prices around 4 mcf for energy arbitrage alone we find that the breakeven capital cost for large scale storage was around 300 kwh in several key locations in 2004 2008 but is around 100 kwh in the same locations today though cost and performance improvements have been continually decreasing the effective cost of energy services from storage fundamental market signals indicating the need for energy storage are at or near 10 year lows for both energy arbitrage and frequency regulation

cloud energy storage for grid scale applications in the uk abstract in this paper the uk s electricity market and battery technologies were researched to determine the economics of aggregating domestic batteries for grid scale services a feasibility study was conducted under three scenarios in order to estimate the value of advanced lead acid ala and lithium ion li batteries for domestic households in the uk a profit optimization model was built using historical market data and technical parameters of the batteries an aggregated system of 5000 batteries was simulated and used to compare and stack value streams of seven different grid scale services in the uk including energy arbitrage reserve and frequency regulation services the results showed that using a battery system for domestic services is currently not economically viable however grid scale provision of dynamic frequency response and fast reserve services yield sufficient annual revenue to compensate for these losses the annual profit margin per household obtained was 532 692 for ala and li batteries respectively allowing a shared margin of 230 300 after accounting for household costs the promotion of an aggregated storage system is hindered by current regulatory barriers in the uk such as a double payment structure for storage operators lack of subsidy and lack of separate definition for storage devices

centripetal and centrifugal incentives in electoral systems this paper investigates how electoral laws affect the position taking incentives of parties and candidates it seeks to extend the finding presented in the classical median voter theorem to a wide class of electoral systems or to show the limits of such extension the factors examined are the district magnitude the electoral formula the number of votes each voter is allowed to cast whether voters can cumulate their votes and whether voters can partially abstain i suggest a crude division of electoral systems into those producing predominantly centripetal incentives and those producing predominantly centrifugal incentives among the factors found to produce centripetal incentives at least in noncumulative systems are the following increases in the number of votes per voter outlawry of partial abstention and decreases in the district magnitude in systems allowing the cumulation of votes matters are a bit different

the role of governance in determining foreign aid flow composition summary we hypothesize that selective donors will use types of aid over which they have more control when providing assistance to poorly governed countries we use an original classification of project purpose codes in the aiddata dataset to categorize aid flows from the period 2004 to 2010 results from fixed effect and compositional data models provide evidence of selectivity in terms of overall aid flows a tradeoff between technical assistance and programmatic lending and a tradeoff between social sector and infrastructure projects

energy storage arbitrage under day ahead and real time price uncertainty electricity markets must match real time supply and demand of electricity with increasing penetration of renewable resources it is important that this balancing is done effectively considering the high uncertainty of wind and solar energy storing electrical energy can make the grid more reliable and efficient and energy storage is proposed as a complement to highly variable renewable energy sources however for investments in energy storage to increase participating in the market must become economically viable for owners this paper proposes a stochastic formulation of a storage owner s arbitrage profit maximization problem under uncertainty in day ahead and real time market prices the proposed model helps storage owners in market bidding and operational decisions and in estimation of the economic viability of energy storage case study results on realistic market price data show that the novel stochastic bidding approach does significantly better than the deterministic benchmark

the disadvantaged incumbents estimating incumbency effects in indian state legislatures this paper estimates the incumbency effects using a large dataset on state legislative elections in india during 1975 2003 i use a regression discontinuity design rdd that estimates the causal effect of incumbency by comparing candidates in closely fought elections i find that there is a significant disadvantage to incumbency in indian state legislative elections and the adverse effect of incumbency has increased after 1991 also the incumbency disadvantage is higher in states that have lower availability of public goods such as health centers and lower employment poverty and per capita income

multistage stochastic investment planning with multiscale representation of uncertainties and decisions we propose a multistage multiscale linear stochastic model to optimize electricity generation storage and transmission investments over a long planning horizon the multiscale structure captures large scale uncertainties such as investment and fuel cost changes and long run demand growth rates and small scale uncertainties such as hour to hour demand and renewable availability uncertainty the model also includes a detailed treatment of operating periods so that the effect of dispatch decisions on long term investments are captured the proposed model can be large in size the progressive hedging algorithm is applied to decompose the model by scenario greatly reducing computation times we also derive bounds on the optimal objective function value to assess solution quality we use a case study based on the state of texas to demonstrate the model and show the benefits of its detailed representation of the operating periods in making investment decisions

when energy storage reduces social welfare this paper examines the potential welfare effects of storage under different market structures this includes combinations of perfectly competitive and strategic generation and storage sectors and standalone and generator owned storage we demonstrate that if the generation sector is perfectly competitive and does not own storage then storage cannot be welfare diminishing otherwise generator owned storage or standalone storage in a market with strategic generating firms can reduce welfare compared to the no storage case this contradicts conventional wisdom that adding firms to an imperfectly competitive market typically reduces welfare losses

an hour ahead prediction model for heavy tailed spot prices abstract we propose an hour ahead prediction model for electricity prices that capture the heavy tailed behavior that we observe in the hourly spot market in the ercot texas and the pjm west hub grids we present a model according to which we separate the price process into a thin tailed trailing median process and a heavy tailed residual process whose probability distribution can be approximated by a cauchy distribution we show empirical evidence that supports our model

the impact of campaign spending on votes in multiparty elections abstract the impact of candidate campaign spending on votes and abstention in multiparty elections is estimated from the specification of a structural model of voter behavior this model accounts for the endogeneity of campaign spending as well as the heterogeneity in voter preferences empirical results are estimated from aggregate actual election data the results demonstrate the importance of spending during the campaign period and voter heterogeneity with respect to these expenditures the own and cross expenditure vote share elasticity estimates reveal that political campaign spending not only redistributes voters across parties but also decreases the size of the abstaining group of the electorate

endogenous institutional change in the mexican senate this article studies the endogenous transformation of the mexican senate changes in the electoral rules for the senate composition are explained as an effort by the partido revolucionario institucional pri politicians to protect their majority in a broader strategy of division and cooptation of its opponents that strategy expanded seats for the opposition while reducing risks for the incumbent party the article calculates through monte carlo simulations counterfactual scenarios for the composition of themexican senate under alternative electoral rules those simulations highlight the inherent uncertainty involved in institutional design in spite of the demise of the pri in the 2000 presidential election the senate will afford in the foreseeable future veto power to the hitherto hegemonic party

optimal energy commitments with storage and intermittent supply we formulate and solve the problem of making advance energy commitments for wind farms in the presence of a storage device with conversion losses mean reverting price process and an autoregressive energy generation process from wind we derive an optimal commitment policy under the assumption that wind energy is uniformly distributed then the stationary distribution of the storage level corresponding to the optimal policy is obtained from which the economic value of the storage as the relative increase in the expected revenue due to the existence of storage is obtained

representation through legislative redistricting a stochastic model this paper builds a stochastic model of the processes that give rise to observed patterns of representation and bias in congressional and state legislative elections the analysis demonstrates that partisan swing and incumbency voting concepts from the congressional elections literature have determinate effects on representation and bias concepts from the redistricting literature the model shows precisely how incumbency and increased variability of partisan swing reduce the responsiveness of the electoral system and how partisan swing affects whether the system is biased toward one party or the other incumbency and other causes of unresponsive representation also reduce the effect of partisan swing on current levels of partisan bias by relaxing the restrictive portions of the widely applied uniform partisan swing assumption the theoretical analysis leads directly to an empirical model enabling one more reliably to estimate responsiveness and bias from a single year of electoral data applying this to data from seven elections in each of six states the paper demonstrates that redistricting has effects in predicted directions in the short run partisan gerrymandering biases the system in favor of the party in control and by freeing up seats held by opposition party incumbents increases the system s responsiveness bipartisan controlled redistricting appears to reduce bias somewhat and dramatically to reduce responsiveness nonpartisan redistricting processes substantially increase responsiveness but do not have as clear an effect on bias however after only two elections prima facie evidence for redistricting effects evaporate in most states finally across every state and type of redistricting process responsiveness declined significantly over the course of the decade this is clear evidence that the phenomenon of vanishing marginals recognized first in the u s congress literature also applies to these different types of state legislative assemblies it also strongly suggests that redistricting could not account for this pattern

economic assessment of concentrated solar power technologies a review abstract this paper surveys economic assessments of concentrated solar power csp technologies and finds two dominant assessment methods a majority of studies reported in the literature are based on the levelized cost of electricity lcoe while a small subset of studies consider time varying meteorological and electricity market conditions several studies argue that lcoe undervalues dynamic flexibility provided by thermal energy storage and does not consider revenue opportunities provided by electricity markets at different time scales as a result some studies find that both lcoe and revenue can in fact be conflicting metrics for certain designs and market conditions this review finds strong variations in lcoe and revenue estimates in the literature as comparisons between csp and other generation technologies e g fossil wind and photovoltaic are dictated by the chosen economic metric it is imperative that policy and investment decisions should carefully consider time varying effects and flexibility finally research directions are proposed to increasing the fidelity of economic assessments and to mitigate discrepancies

workers compensation and moral hazard two types of moral hazard have been determined the first type is related to self prevention activities affecting probabilities of accidents the second type relates to the agent s activities whenever the accident occurs the authors objective consists of presenting an empirical measure of the significance of this second type of moral hazard in the workers compensation market the main challenge in isolating moral hazard consists of dividing into two parts the total variation in recovery time with respect to changes in insurance coverage 1 the variation of consumption corresponding to a given level of information and 2 the variation of consumption due to greater asymmetrical information the methodology used in this study separates these two variations copyright 1991 by mit press

using storage capacity rights to overcome the cost recovery hurdle for energy storage energy storage is unique in that it can provide multiple services this feature raises cost recovery issues for storage due to the combination of competitive markets and ratebased cost recovery used in many power systems today this hybrid regulatory paradigm relies on classifying assets as providing competitively prices or unpriced services and handling cost recovery based on that classification some recent regulatory precedents suggest that storage developers must choose between classifying their assets as providing competitively priced or unpriced services in the former case storage costs must be recovered through the market if an asset is classified as providing only unpriced services costs can be recovered through the ratebase this regulatory design can hamper cost recovery for storage and may lead to inefficient storage investment and use we propose an alternate solution whereby storage capacity rights are auctioned to third parties that use their rights for priced or unpriced services storage capacity rights disentangle storage cost recovery from the regulatory treatment of its end use we formulate the storage capacity auction model and demonstrate how to efficiently price storage capacity rights we show that the revenues earned by the storage owner through the auction equals the imputed marginal value of storage capacity as revealed by the market bids

economic theories of legal liability most civil disputes concern liability the defendant is liable when the law requires him to pay damages for harm done to the plaintiff legal scholars discuss at least three objectives of liability law compensating victims deterring injurers and spreading risk economic theories in contrast tend to understand liability law as a search for efficiency in incentives and risk bearing this essay synthesizes and re conceptualizes some central results of the economic analysis of liability law and sketches the legal details that drive them three different legal mechanisms for creating efficient incentives are examined in turn the first mechanism uses the legal rule of strict liability to internalize costs the second mechanism uses a negligence standard to create and enforce efficient standards of behavior the third mechanism uses law to channel transactions into voluntary exchange the initial explanation of the three mechanisms makes simplifying assumptions of perfect information solvency costless dispute resolution and risk neutrality before examining the results of relaxing these assumptions the rules of the three major bodies of liability law property contracts and torts will be analyzed as examples within these three mechanisms contract law concerns broken promises tort law concerns accidental or intentional harm to people or property and property law concerns appropriation of ownership rights or interference with them

more sneezing less crime health shocks and the market for offenses abstract a large literature points out that exposure to criminal victimization has far reaching effects on public health what remains surprisingly unexplored is that role that health shocks play in explaining aggregate fluctuations in offending this research finds novel evidence that crime is sensitive to health shocks we consider the responsiveness of crime to a pervasive and common health shock which we argue shifts costs and benefits for offenders and victims seasonal allergies leveraging daily variation in city specific pollen counts we present evidence that violent crime declines in u s cities on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high and that these effects are driven by residential violence while past literature suggests that property crimes have more instrumental motives require planning and hence are particularly sensitive to permanent changes in the cost and benefits of crime we find that violence may be especially sensitive to health shocks

a unified method of evaluating electoral systems and redistricting plans we derive a unified statistical method with which one can produce substantially improved definitions and estimates of almost any feature of two party electoral systems that can be defined based on district vote shares our single method enables one to calculate more efficient estimates with more trustworthy assessments of their uncertainty than each of the separate multifarious existing measures of partisan bias electoral responsiveness seats votes curves expected or predicted vote in each district in a legislature the probability that a given party will win the seat in each district the proportion of incumbents or others who will lose their seats the proportion of women or minority candidates to be elected the incumbency advantage and other causal effects the likely effects on the electoral system and district votes of proposed electoral reforms such as term limitations campaign spending limits and drawing majority minority districts and numerous others to illustrate we estimate the partisan bias and electoral responsiveness of the u s house of representatives since 1900 and evaluate the fairness of competing redistricting plans for the 1992 ohio state legislature

risk constrained bidding and offering strategy for a merchant compressed air energy storage plant electricity price forecasts are imperfect therefore a merchant energy storage facility requires a bidding and offering strategy for purchasing and selling the electricity to manage the risk associated with price forecast errors this paper proposes an information gap decision theory igdt based risk constrained bidding offering strategy for a merchant compressed air energy storage caes plant that participates in the day ahead energy markets considering price forecasting errors price uncertainty is modeled using igdt the igdt based self scheduling formulation is then used to construct separate hourly bidding and offering curves the theoretical approach to develop the proposed strategy is presented and validated using numerical simulations

electoral systems and institutional choice a case study of the 1988 korean elections this article shows how the ruling party of korea the djp chose and implemented a strategy to win the 13th national assembly election of 1988 and explains why that strategy failed in addition this election is analyzed in a more general context the authors find for example that the preference of a party over electoral systems is determined by the spatial distribution of its votes and that the choice of an electoral system is the outcome of a bargaining process among the parties in the context of democratization the korean experience shows that the democratic reform policies of an authoritarian government are shaped by the interplay between the ruling party s desire to create a political system wherein they maintain power and the constraints to create a system that would channel the opposition s activities into electoral or institutional outlets

after the break up institutional design in transitional states this article integrates historical and rational choice approaches to institutional origin and change to explain the establishment of electoral systems in three former soviet central asian republics kazakhstan kyrgyzstan and uzbekistan it argues that institutions designed under transitional circumstances are products of the interaction between the preceding historical and institutional setting and the dynamic uncertainty that surrounds them strategic actors engaged in the process of institutional design use both contexts in order to assess the degree to and direction in which their relative power is changing they then negotiate accordingly so as to attain their preferred institutional outcomes central asia s electoral systems in particular can be best understood as the product of very similar and long standing regional power struggles being played out under varying dynamic and uncertain conditions

estimating incumbency advantage without bias in this paper we prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that all existing measures of incumbency advantage in the congressional elections literature are biased or inconsistent we then provide an unbiased estimator based on a very simple linear regression model we apply this new method to congressional elections since 1900 providing the first evidence of a positive incumbency advantage in the first half of the century incumbency advantage is the most frequently studied factor in the last 15 years of congressional elections research discovery of the increase in incum bency advantage has sparked controversy over its origins historical pattern cur rent magnitude and electoral democratic and policy consequences even the most basic descriptive information about incumbency advantage is flawed be cause every previous measure based on aggregate data in this literature is plagued by selection bias inconsistencies and inefficiencies we prove this result and also propose a new unbiased and statistically efficient measure that is very easy to calculate congressional elections from 1900 to the present fit our theoretical model our empirical reanalyses do not challenge the existing scholarly consen sus that incumbency advantage is much larger than it once was however we do challenge the prevailing belief that incumbency advantage was nonexistent and the evidence that it was negative in house elections during the first half of this century alford and brady 1988 we show instead that the average advantage of incumbency in these elections was about two percentage points in section 1 of this paper we define incumbency advantage and section 2 gives an intuitive sense of the problems identifying it even in ideal electoral sys tems section 3 formally proves that sophomore surge and retirement slump are biased estimates of incumbency advantage and section 4 briefly reveals the flaws

information costs and incentives to shirk disability compensation of air traffic controllers it has become fashionable in recent years to level charges of abuse at a variety of social welfare programs unemployment insurance and certain disability compensation programs come to mind as targets of a barrage of criticism based on inherent work disincentives and sloppy administration no doubt there is an element of truth in many of the criticisms however it is one thing to allege the existence of disincentives and quite another to predict the ways in which they will alter observable behavior this paper attempts the latter task numerous authors have noted that the incentives imbedded in any contract are a function of the contractual provisions and enforcement by its very nature a contract governing exchange between two parties constrains their behavior each contractual provision or restriction attempts to limit the responses of both parties however if the restrictions are not perfectly enforced the constraints are not binding which lowers the costs of contractual violations depending upon the type of contract these violations may be labeled default cheating shirking fraud negligence or moral hazard as a case in point consider the analysis by armen alchian and harold demsetz 1972 of the possibility that individuals might shirk contractual responsibilities if benefits exceeded the costs recall that the theory of shirking was originally couched in terms of a utility maximizing employee s laborleisure tradeoff labor time yields a pecuniary reward in the form of income leisure may be thought of as its own reward or as the time devoted to the individual s other desired pursuits given a time constraint an individual will allocate his labor to equate the gains from income with the gains from leisure at the margin if labor rewards are not perfectly correlated with productive effort then the incentive to produce is diminished shirking results if shirking could be costlessly detected neither party to a contract would have an incentive to shirk since the full costs of shirking could be brought to bear on the guilty party through renegotiations of the terms of trade however if detecting shirking through some monitoring mechanism is costly the guilty party will not generally be forced to bear the full costs of his behavior monitoring will only be undertaken so long as the marginal gains from reduced shirking equal or exceed the marginal costs of detection less than perfect monitoring implies some shirking incentives remain strickly speaking shirking may be defined as the act of seeking to avoid performance of contractual duty although alchian and demsetz developed the theory to explain organizations of employer employee relationships it is clear that it can be applied to any contract their results are now well known contractual violations are an increas university of delaware and purdue university respectively we are indebted to the carthage foundation and the krannert graduate school at purdue university for financial support we thank numerous colleagues at the university of delaware and purdue university for intellectual support in particular thanks must go to jack barron james chelius robert clower and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments on earlier drafts while much of the data used for testing came from owcp the faa and lengthy interviews with individuals in the air traffic control industry none of these groups encouraged or funded this study the views expressed here are solely our own the individual still adjusts at his labor leisure margin positive detection costs imply that each person will be induced to take more leisure because the effect of relaxing on his realized reward rate of substitution between output and leisure will be less than the effect on the true rate of substitution his realized cost of leisure will fall more than the true cost of leisure so he buys more leisure i e more nonpecuniary reward alchian and demsetz p 780

assessing the economic value and optimal structure of large scale electricity storage large scale electricity storage can enable arbitrage between periods when electricity is abundant and cheap and periods when it is scarce in principle this could enable greater use of baseload generation and encourage investments in intermittent capacity such as wind and solar if storage is to penetrate the system the marginal value of storage capacity must be high enough to enable investments in storage to have a significant impact on investments in intermittent technologies it must be large enough to affect the prices on the system this research develops a theoretical framework to evaluate the marginal values of the components of a storage system and to characterize the impact of storage on the price patterns in the system the theoretical approach is applied to an example system to illustrate the changes in marginal values as storage penetrates the system and the impact on system prices

a comparative analysis of the value of pure and hybrid electricity storage significant natural gas and electricity price variation and volatility especially during the past few years raise questions about understanding the value drivers behind electricity storage the impact of these drivers for pure storage such as pumped hydroelectric storage and compressed air energy storage caes are different and in this paper we explore these differences in operation and net revenue over a variety of timescales we also consider the arbitrage value that is attainable in practice and explain why simple forecasting techniques based on historical data will generally be less successful for caes the breakeven cost of storage and how this can depend on regulatory treatment of storage and market structure is also considered

economics of electric energy storage for energy arbitrage and regulation in new york unlike markets for storable commodities electricity markets depend on the real time balance of supply and demand although much of the present day grid operates effectively without storage cost effective ways of storing electrical energy can help make the grid more efficient and reliable we investigate the economics of two emerging electric energy storage ees technologies sodium sulfur batteries and flywheel energy storage systems in new york state s electricity market the analysis indicates that there is a strong economic case for ees installations in the new york city region for applications such as energy arbitrage and that significant opportunities exist throughout new york state for regulation services benefits from deferral of system upgrades may be important in the decision to deploy ees market barriers currently make it difficult for energy limited ees such as flywheels to receive revenue for voltage regulation charging efficiency is more important to the economics of ees in a competitive electricity market than has generally been recognized