alternative models of restructured electricity systems part 1 no market power different equilibrium concepts have been proposed by various authors schweppe et al hogan et al chao and peck wu et al to analyse competitive electricity systems we establish correspondences between these different models through a single framework and provide additional interpretations of these equilibrium concepts this unifying conceptual view also provides a computationally feasible approach to simulate the market it also opens the way to the modeling of some imperfect markets

transmission access and pricing with multiple separate energy forward markets california s congestion management protocols provide comparable access and prices to all users of the transmission system power exchange and bilateral contract parties the users implicitly bid for capacity on major transmission paths between zones the independent system operator iso allocates the available transmission capacity on these paths so that it maximizes the value of this capacity as measured by the users bids everyone scheduling flow on a congested path is charged the marginal cost based price for using the path the iso keeps each party s portfolio of generation and load individually in balance when adjusting schedules to relieve congestion on interzonal paths by keeping the portfolios of the different parties separate the iso clears its transmission market without arranging energy trades between parties parties are responsible for arranging their own trades the iso does not become involved in the energy forward markets

using water allocation in israel as a proxy for imputing the value of agricultural amenities this paper uses the water allocation economy in israel as a proxy for imputing the value of agricultural amenities a general equilibrium model is developed and incorporates agricultural amenities as byproducts of agricultural production water trade channels and multiple water types the premise is that until a decade ago water policy in israel was interlinked with agricultural land use policy integrating a monte carlo analysis the model searches for a baseline minimum value of agricultural amenity that makes household in the counterfactual scenario indifferent between the administrative and market mechanisms the minimum imputed value is around 109 agricultural output the intuition is that the gains in economic welfare from improved water use efficiency are offset by the losses in social welfare due to a reduction in available agricultural amenities

urban sprawl and farmland prices a theoretical model of farmland valuation is developed to explicitly account for three effects of urban sprawl conversion of farmland to urban uses effect on agricultural returns and speculative effect as represented by farmland conversion risk this model is estimated using county level data in the continental united states evidence is found for all three effects of urban sprawl on farmland values counties more accessible to major urban centers have higher net agricultural returns subsidiary evidence supports that the latter effect may be attributed to survival of or conversion to high valued agriculture around urban centers

marginal pricing and supplement cost allocation in transmission open access the application of marginal costing to transmission pricing in open access schemes requires the collection of a supplement to finance the transmission systems the paper describes the application of marginal cost based pricing in the chilean power system and the difficulties faced in allocating the supplement among parties involved alternative methods for defining the allocation are formulated generalized generation and load distribution factors for cost allocation are formulated and implemented the methods are applied to allocate payments for transmission services provided by the transmission network and by a distribution company

contingent transmission rights in the standard market design we define transmission rights that are compatible with the federal energy regulatory commission s proposed standard market design smd and that provide flexibility in the points of receipt or delivery of energy contracts the contingent transmission rights introduced here provide a viable flexible method for defining smd compatible rights for transmission customers having current pre smd transmission rights that cover multiple points these contingent rights can be bought and sold in the transmission rights auctions under smd

market based transmission expansion planning restructuring and deregulation has exposed transmission planner to new objectives and uncertainties therefore new criteria and approaches are needed for transmission planning in deregulated environments a new market based approach for transmission planning in deregulated environments is presented in this paper the main contribution of this research is i introducing a new probabilistic tool named probabilistic locational marginal prices for computing the probability density functions of nodal prices ii defining new market based criteria for transmission expansion planning in deregulated environments and iii presenting a new approach for transmission expansion planning in deregulated environments using the above tool and criteria the advantages of this approach are i it encourages and facilitates competition among all participants ii it provides nondiscriminatory access to cheap generation for all consumers iii it considers all random and nonrandom power system uncertainties and selects the final plan after risk assessment of all solutions and iv it is value based and considers investment cost operation cost congestion cost load curtailment cost and cost caused by system unreliability the presented approach is applied to ieee 30 bus test system

determinants of land value volatility in the u s corn belt understanding land value volatility and its reaction to exogenous shocks helps land owners investors and lenders assess risk land value volatility the variance of the unpredictable component of

agricultural land values and the value of rights to future land development we investigate the inuence of fu ture land development on current agricultural land values from a theoretical model of land markets we derive a reduced form expression for agricultural land values in terms of observable variables this result dictates the speci cation of our econometric model and we nd strong sup port for the model in an application to new york state the estimated model together with a spa tial interpolation algorithm is used to generate a surface of estimated development rights values for orange county this approach overcomes several problems that arise with the use of stan dard appraisal methods to value conservation easements jel q24

a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of financial transmission rights financial transmission rights ftrs are complementary to the locational marginal pricing of energy the basic aim of the ftr mechanism is to guard forward contracts from uncertain congestion charges ftrs are also useful to individual generators and loads for selling and buying power respectively at the prices of other locations the concept has evolved encompassing many features such as a simultaneous feasibility test various ways to conduct auctions and allocations and secondary trading ftrs also have a close relation to market power and transmission investment this paper reviews most of the landmark research papers on the evolution of the ftr concept it reports a comprehensive assessment of various facets of ftrs and allied issues financial transmission rights and flowgate rights fgrs are compared the concept of long term ftrs is discussed the paper also touches upon future proposals in this area

transmission expansion planning in electricity markets this paper presents a mixed integer linear programming lp formulation for the long term transmission expansion planning problem in a competitive pool based electricity market to achieve optimal expansion planning while modeling market functioning we define a number of scenarios based on the future demand in the system and we simulate the maximization of the aggregate social welfare investment and operating costs transmission losses and generator offers and demand bids are considered we propose to use a set of metrics to rate the effect of the expansion on the generators demands and the system as a whole the proposed model is applied to the garver six bus system and to the ieee 24 bus reliability test system simulation results can be interpreted in economic terms based on the values of the metrics obtained for different scenarios parameters and topologies

introduction to multidimensional financial transmission rights this paper introduces the concept of multidimensional financial transmission right mdftr which is a generalized group financial transmission right ftr concept an mdftr allows its owner to hold a total ftr amount over a path group along with multiple choices to distribute this grouped amount among the individual grouping paths this added flexibility provides forward market participants with a useful support to overcome the congestion price risk that originates from the uncertainty in their transaction paths all the fundamental issues regarding the implementation of mdftrs are addressed in detail in this paper the practical utility of mdftrs is judged by analyzing their costs it is shown with illustration that an mdftr may be more cost effective than any given portfolio of individual ftrs that has the ability to give the same risk hedging benefit

the impacts of different farm programs on cash rents county level annual observations for iowa from 1996 through 2000 were used to measure the impacts of farm program payments on cash rental rates the econometric analysis explicitly incorporates spatial autocorrelation cash rental rates were found to increase by almost one dollar per acre for each additional dollar per acre paid for market loss assistance and production flexibility contracts whereas conservation reserve program payments appear to exert no effect on cash rental rates a counterintuitive finding that warrants further examination is the small but negative impact of deficiency payments on cash rental rates

directional heterogeneity in distance profiles in hedonic property value models abstract in environmental economics hedonic property value hpv models have often employed distance from a localized environmental disamenity as a proxy for perceived risk the magnitude of a distance effect on housing prices however may depend upon the direction in which it is being measured we generalize conventional distance models to allow for continuously varying directional effects by converting from cartesian to polar coordinates a simple empirical example for housing prices around woburn massachusetts between 1988 and 1996 illustrates how failure to allow for directional heterogeneity can obscure otherwise statistically significant distance effects in hpv

border flow rights and contracts for differences of differences models for electric transmission property rights in this paper a property rights model for electric transmission is proposed and its properties analyzed the proposed rights called border flow rights support financial hedging of transmission risk and merchant transmission expansion through associated financial rights called contracts for differences of differences these financial rights allow for forward trading of both energy and transmission by a unified exchange avoiding the bifurcation in current markets between decentralized long term energy trading and centralized long term transmission trading such long term trading can help to support the financing of both generation and transmission assets we consider incentive properties of such a right in the absence of lumpiness economies of scale and market power

optimal transmission switching sensitivity analysis and extensions in this paper we continue to analyze optimal dispatch of generation and transmission topology to meet load as a mixed integer program mip with binary variables representing the state of the transmission element line or transformer previous research showed a 25 savings by dispatching the ieee 118 bus test case this paper is an extension of that work it presents how changing the topology affects nodal prices load payment generation revenues cost and rents congestion rents and flowgate prices results indicate that changing the topology to cut costs typically results in lower load payments and higher generation rents for this network computational issues are also discussed

an oligopolistic model of an integrated market for energy and spinning reserve in this paper a model for oligopolistic competition in electricity markets is presented most previous proposed models have been static and focused only on the energy market incentives for strategic behavior in contrast in this paper a multiperiod market for energy and spinning reserve sr is considered by including such factors the competition among participants is modeled with more realism competition in the energy market is modeled by means of conjectured supply functions while conjectured reserve price response functions are used to consider the generators ability to alter the sr prices the resulting equilibrium problem is modeled in terms of complementarity conditions based upon a complementarity model the opportunity cost between the energy and sr markets is derived for oligopolistic markets the proposed model is illustrated by a six node network using a dc approximation

on the choice of funtional form for hedonic price functions this study examines how errors in measuring marginal attribute pric es vary with the form of the hedonic price function in simulations consumers with known utility functions bid for houses with given attributes various forms of the hedonic function are estimated using equilibrium housing prices errors in estimating marginal attribute prices are calculated by comparing each consumer s equilibrium marginal bid vector with the gradient of the hedonic function when all attributes are observed linear and quadratic box cox forms produce lowest mean percentage errors however when some attributes are unobserved or are replaced by proxies linear and linear box cox functions perform best copyright 1988 by mit press

which hedonic models can we trust to recover the marginal willingness to pay for environmental amenities abstract the hedonic property value model is among our foremost tools for evaluating the economic consequences of policies that target the supply of local public goods environmental services and urban amenities we design a theoretically consistent and empirically realistic monte carlo study of whether omitted variables seriously undermine the method s ability to accurately identify economic values our results suggest that large gains in accuracy can be realized by moving from the standard linear specifications for the price function to a more flexible framework that uses a combination of spatial fixed effects quasi experimental identification and temporal controls for housing market adjustment

bidding strategy of virtual power plant for participating in energy and spinning reserve markets part i problem formulation this paper addresses the bidding problem faced by a virtual power plant vpp in a joint market of energy and spinning reserve service the proposed bidding strategy is a non equilibrium model based on the deterministic price based unit commitment pbuc which takes the supply demand balancing constraint and security constraints of vpp itself into account the presented model creates a single operating profile from a composite of the parameters characterizing each distributed energy resources der which is a component of vpp and incorporates network constraints into its description of the capabilities of the portfolio the presented model is a nonlinear mixed integer programming with inter temporal constraints and solved by genetic algorithm ga

can stigma explain large property value losses the psychology and economics of superfund this research documents the long term impacts of delayed cleanup on property values in communities neighboring prominent superfund sites the research examines the sale prices of nearly 34 000 homes near sites in three metropolitan areas for up to a 30 year period to our knowledge no other property value studies have examined sites in multiple areas with large property value losses over the length of time used here the results are both surprising and inconsistent with most prior work the principal result is that when cleanup is delayed for 10 15 and even up to 20 years the discounted present value of the cleanup is mostly lost a possible explanation for these property value losses is that the sites are stigmatized and the homes in the surrounding communities are shunned the results suggest that expedited cleanup and minimizing the number of stigmatizing events would reduce these losses

linking the price of agricultural land to use values and amenities the recent appreciation in agricultural land values across the united states has raised a number of important questions for farmers farmland owners lenders and policy makers while traditional economic theory suggests that farmland values are determined by the discounted stream of expected returns previous research has shown that agricultural land values are actually driven by a complex set of factors this study leverages the unique characteristics of a national land based usda survey on farmland values and cash rents to estimate broad national level determinants of the market value of cropland and pastureland our results support past research findings that indicate farmland values are only partially explained by agricultural returns we find that multiple nonagricultural attributes of farmland also contribute to the market value

is a minimum wage an appropriate instrument for redistribution textabstractwe analyze the redistributional dis advantages of a minimum wage over income taxation in competitive labor markets without imposing assumptions on the in efficiency of labor rationing compared to a distributionally equivalent tax change a minimum wage increase raises involuntary unemployment but also raises skill formation as some individuals avoid unemployment a minimum wage is an appropriate instrument for redistribution if and only if the public revenue gains from additional skill formation outweigh both the public revenue losses from additional unemployment and the utility losses of inefficient labor rationing we show that this critically depends on how labor rationing is distributed among workers a necessary condition for the desirability of a minimum wage increase is that the public revenue gains from higher skill formation outweigh the revenue losses from higher unemployment we write this condition in terms of measurable sufficient statistics our empirical analysis suggests that a minimum wage increase is undesirable in nearly all oecd countries a reduction in the minimum wage along with tax adjustments that keep net incomes constant would yield a pareto improvement

effect of urban proximity on agricultural land values this article seeks to more accurately estimate the size and distance of the effect of urban proximity on agricultural land values the econometric model lets the size and distance of the effect of urban proximity on agricultural land values vary by population real income and time the changes in the effect of urban proximity over time can be largely explained by population and income thus there does not appear to be a shift in preferences toward living further from the city center

transmission rights and transmission expansions in this paper we propose a new method of defining rights that may be assigned to the developer of a transmission expansion project they include a right to collect the value of the capacity provided by the expansion project as well as the value arising from the admittance of the expansion project this approach not only ties the rights allocation to actual physical characteristics of the transmission project but also allows such allocation to remain independent both of the order in which the projects are treated and of any previously allocated transmission rights

vegetable spirits and energy policy this study investigates the extent to which the 2005 energy policy act specifically the ethanol mandate contributed to the rise in farmland values we use the location of new ethanol plants to identify the capitalization effect of the mandate by these spatially advantaged operations we use a difference in difference propensity score matching estimator to control for the non random selection of ethanol production facilities the empirical strategy uses farmland parcel values from the 2001 7 june agriculture survey we find that new ethanol facilities had no effect on nearby farmland values prior to the mandate but had statistically significant effects after the policy copyright 2013 oxford university press

factors influencing illinois farmland values a hedonic model of illinois farmland values is estimated using county level cross section time series data explanatory variables include land productivity parcel size improvements distances to chicago and other large cities an urban rural index livestock production through swine operation scale and farm density measures population density income and inflation the inclusion of spatial and serial correlation components substantially improves the model fit farmland values decline with parcel size ruralness distance to chicago and large cities and swine farm density and increase with soil productivity population density and personal income

understanding farmland price changes this paper develops a structural model of land prices which includes the multidimensional effects of inflation on capital erosion savings return erosion and real debt reduction as well as the effect of changes in the opportunity cost of capital the results show that inflation and changes in the real returns on capital are major explanatory factors in farmland price swings in addition to returns to farming additionally the effects of credit market constraints and expectations schemes are considered explicitly in the analytical model

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

market based coordination of transmission and generation capacity planning we propose an iso model for coordinating transmission expansion planning with competitive generation capacity planning in electricity markets the purpose of the model is a holistic simulation of generation and transmission capacity expansion in the market environment the solution represents an iterative process for simulating the interactions among gencos transcos and the iso which might be terminated by the iso based on a pre specified stopping criterion the proposed model adopts a joint energy and transmission auction market and a capacity mechanism the joint auction market enables competition to occur among generation and transmission resources the capacity mechanism offers incentives for market participant investments that reflect the locational values of additional capacity transmission capacity expansion decisions are made by merchant transmission lines that recover their capacity investments through transmission marginal pricing and capacity payments transmission network security is reflected in the proposed competitive resource planning model the examples illustrate a coordinated planning of generation and transmission in restructured power systems

transmission switching in expansion planning transmission switching ts is introduced to add flexibility to the transmission and generation capacity expansion planning problem ts could improve the performance of the capacity expansion planning model and reduce the total planning cost the capacity expansion planning problem is decomposed into a master problem and two subproblems the master problem utilizes the candidate set for additional generating unit and transmission capacity investments to find the optimal plan throughout the planning horizon the subproblems use the optimal plan apply transmission switching to relieve any transmission flow violations and calculate the optimal dispatch of generating units the transmission network contingencies are also considered in the subproblems the case studies exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed expansion planning approach

marginal pricing of transmission services an analysis of cost recovery this paper presents an in depth analysis of network revenues computed with marginal pricing and in particular it investigates the reasons why marginal prices fail to recover the total incurred network costs in actual power systems the basic theoretical results are presented and the major causes of the mismatch between network costs and marginal revenues are identified and illustrated with numerical examples some tutorial and others of realistic size the regulatory implications of marginal network pricing in the context of competitive electricity markets are analyzed and suggestions are provided for the meaningful allocation of the costs of the network among its users

tractable transmission topology control using sensitivity analysis the standard economic generation dispatch ed minimizes generation costs subject to transmission constraints where the status of each line i e open or closed is fixed recent research shows that by optimally dispatching the network topology along with generation resources significant congestion costs may be avoided optimal topology control i e appropriate changes of transmission line status for real sized power networks requires the solution of a computationally intractable mixed integer linear program however it appears that much of the cost savings may be attained by changing the status of just a few lines this paper proposes tractable transmission topology control policies which employ sensitivity information readily available from the ed to select candidate lines to change status while maintaining system connectivity implementation on the ieee 118 bus test system found that our best performing policy captured an average of 96 of the potential cost savings moreover the limited computational effort required suggests that these policies could be employed in real system operations

transmission assets investment timing using net present value curves improvement and expansion of the transmission grid is still an unresolved issue in the new competitive environment in current electricity markets transmission lines have become assets that need financial instruments for investors who wish to ensure steady long term returns and to withstand short term market volatility the timing and the combination of new transmission investments is key to analyze their long term effects this paper presents the concept of net present value npv curve to estimate the best investment time for the investor where the curve is constructed by calculating the npvs resulting from the investment in successive years a specific contract model based on financial transmission rights ftr is used for the npv evaluation of transmission assets and the stochastic properties of all variables related to the investment market structure are considered the model is applied to the ieee 24 bus reliability test system rts showing the approach capabilities as a decision aid tool for transmission investors

an analysis of the marginal value of electricity transmission lines in the dispatch possible applications the marginal value of transmission lines in the dispatch is widely used in the literature and has relevant practical applications related to planning the expansion of the transmission grid and computing the remuneration of merchant lines this paper presents a general formulation of the marginal value of a line in the dispatch that highlights the dependence of this value on the link between line admittance and capacity we discuss the value of a line according to marginal principles following a general approach and prove that only if the admittance of a line can be expressed as a linear function of its capacity or when admittance and capacity can be deemed independent is this value equal to the product of the difference between marginal electricity prices at both ends of the line and the flow through this line afterwards we show that under a set of stylized conditions the remuneration of efficient network investments according to their marginal value in the dispatch should result in an exact recovery of their cost finally we compute the marginal value of lines in a stylized though representative system for several relationships between line capacities and admittances to illustrate the theoretical results obtained

the effects of a natural gas boom on employment and income in colorado texas and wyoming improvements in technology have made it profitable to tap unconventional gas reservoirs in relatively impermeable shale and sandstone deposits which are spread throughout the u s mostly in rural areas proponents of gas drilling point to the activity s local economic benefits yet no empirical studies have systematically documented the magnitude or distribution of economic gains i estimate these gains for counties in colorado texas and wyoming three states where natural gas production expanded substantially since the late 1990s i find that a large increase in the value of gas production caused modest increases in employment wage and salary income and median household income the results suggest that each million dollars in gas production created 2 35 jobs in the county of production which led to an annualized increase in employment that was 1 5 of the pre boom level for the average gas boom county comparisons show that ex ante estimates of the number of jobs created by developing the fayetteville and marcellus shale gas formations may have been too large

transfer capability improvement through market based operation of series facts devices traditionally electric system operators have dispatched generation to minimize total production costs ignoring the flexibility of the transmission system implementation of smart grid systems could allow operators to co optimize flexible transmission alongside generation dispatch the technologies that would enable such co optimization are still regulated as part of the monopoly transmission system one particular flexible transmission asset is variable impedance flexible ac transmission system facts this paper 1 points out the positive externality problem existing in a recent market design proposal with active transmission participation and 2 proposes a sensitivity based method to estimate the marginal market value of facts adjustments to overcome this positive externality problem the marginal value would suggest efficient impedance adjustments to the operator and provide the right financial incentives for the facts owners to operate their assets in a socially optimal way revenue adequacy is demonstrated under specific conditions and more broadly investigated through simulation studies an analytical example on a two bus system as well as a numerical study on the ieee 118 bus system are presented the results suggest that inclusion of a price signal for facts devices would lead to significant social welfare improvements in competitive power markets

a two tier matrix game approach for obtaining joint bidding strategies in ftr and energy markets transmission congestion results in revenue collected from the loads that often exceeds the payment made to the generators the financial transmission right ftr is an instrument that allows the independent system operator iso to redistribute the excess revenue congestion charge among the market participants generators and loads hold ftrs to hedge against congestion charges since the revenues from the ftr and energy markets are interdependent each generator and load must have a joint bidding strategy for ftr and energy markets to maximize its total payoff this paper presents a two tier matrix game model that allows the generators and loads to obtain joint bidding strategies the model also allows the isos and the market designers to assess the impact of various network configurations and rules on market performance e g market power the two tier model considers multiple participants multidimensional bid vectors network contingencies and varying demand we conducted a numerical validation of our model by analyzing the three node network studied by joskow and tirole 2000 additional numerical studies were conducted on a five node network to examine the impact of holding ftrs on the bidding strategies in the energy market and joint payoffs of the participants

does student employment really impact academic achievement the case of france student employment is usually thought to curb academic achievement our research relating to a survey at a french university in 2012 emphasizes the significance of the intensity of student working hours allowance for the endogeneity of student employment reinforces the negative effects particularly for young people working more than 16 hours a week however the academic achievement of those working fewer than 8 hours per week seems unaffected the type of employment also affects the chances of success students with public sector jobs appear to be less prone to failure possibly because of more flexible working hours

the impacts of transmission topology control on the european electricity network the european union is targeting a 20 share of energy from renewable resources by 2020 and this increase is in turn expected to lead to operational challenges that will require various congestion management actions by system operators in this paper we deal with topology control of the transmission network as a congestion management resource and evaluate the impacts of topology control on the european electricity network to do this we co optimize unit commitment and transmission switching over 24 h and we use a decomposition scheme to tackle the resulting large scale problem our analysis is conducted on different scenarios of load and renewable power generation we find that topology control results in significant cost savings within europe which tend to be inversely related to net load the robustness of our results is supported by an extensive sensitivity analysis

a joint energy and transmission rights auction proposal and properties an auction based process is proposed that allows power market participants to acquire and reconfigure financial transmission rights the process simultaneously accommodates flowgate and point to point options and obligations along with energy production and consumption futures a sequence of auctions is held during which participants can buy and sell rights which are then settled in a day ahead or real time auction at which time all rights are cashed out by allowing flowgate and point to point obligations and options to be reconfigured and exchanged the market can decide what combination of financial rights are most useful to power generators consumers and traders rights can be specified not only for capacity of individual flowgates but also for more complex transmission constraints such as nomograms under certain conditions we prove that the auction is revenue adequate for the market operator in that payments to rights holders cannot exceed congestion revenues we present a linearized dc auction along with a numerical illustration

values in the wind a hedonic analysis of wind power facilities the siting of wind facilities is extremely controversial this paper uses data on 11 331 property transactions over nine years in northern new york state to explore the effects of new wind facilities on property values we use a fixed effects framework to control for omitted variables and endogeneity biases we find that nearby wind facilities significantly reduce property values in two of the three counties studied these results indicate that existing compensation to local homeowners communities may not be sufficient to prevent a loss of property values jel q51 q53

smart flexible just in time transmission and flowgate bidding there is currently a national push to create a smarter grid currently the full control of transmission assets is not built in network optimization models with more sophisticated modeling of transmission assets it is possible to better utilize the current infrastructure to improve the social welfare co optimizing the generation with the network topology has been shown to reduce the total dispatch cost in this paper we propose the concept of just in time transmission this concept is predicated on the fact that transmission that is a detriment to network efficiency can be kept offline when not needed and with the proper smart grid advanced technology can be switched back into service once there is a disturbance we determine which lines to have offline based on the optimal transmission switching model previously proposed a secondary topic of this paper focuses on flowgate bidding approved by the federal energy regulatory commission and implemented within the spp and nyiso networks flowgate bidding is defined as allowing a line s flow to exceed its rated capacity for a short period of time for a set penalty i e price we demonstrate the effectiveness of these models by testing them on large scale iso network models

definition of an efficient transmission system using cooperative games theory under a context of transmission open access a methodology to define a common transmission trunk system using economic and technical criteria is proposed a transmission trunk system is defined as a unique and common system constituted by electrical lines and substations that are economically efficient and necessary to allow the development of an electrical market and the supply of demand in the respective electrical system at a minimum cost and in an efficient manner the principles of cooperation and interaction between agents that are the base for the cooperative games theory are used simple games and the shapley value approach are used the proposal responds to the need to identify a common main system common to supply and demand agents needed in system open access schemes in electricity markets

use value assessment tax expenditures in urban areas abstract use value assessment is the practice of valuing land for property tax purposes in its current use rather than at its full market value this practice is widespread in the u s and is intended to reduce the property tax burden on agricultural land near urban areas and slow the pace of land development we examine the foregone property tax revenue or tax expenditure due to use value assessment data sets for two case studies are employed in empirical estimation of spatial models of the difference between market value and use value providing the analytic basis for estimates of tax expenditures

the impact of decoupled payments on u s cropland values an extensive literature has shown that various farm programs may influence the value of farmland but other studies have not examined the cropland price effects of direct or decoupled payments separate from countercyclical payments this study uses nationally representative confidential field level panel data with farmer reported per acre land values we analyze the impact of decoupled and other farm program payments on farmland values using a fixed effects model and controlling for various factors that influence farmland values we find that an additional dollar of decoupled payments has a large and statistically significant impact on farmland values of about 18 per acre these results are comparable with similar studies undertaken in europe

network models of spatial oligopoly with an application to deregulation of electricity generation because of the existence of transmission costs and significant scale economies in power production deregulation of electricity generation would lead to spatial oligopolistic markets this paper uses linear programs to obtain short run spatial price equilibria for a deregulated bulk power market in upstate new york these models unlike most previous models of imperfect competition capture spatial variations in production costs and demand functions we present two models one calculates a nash bertrand equilibrium in which each firm believes that rivals will not react to price changes this equilibrium represents the most intense level of competition to be expected the other model yields limit prices that are designed to discourage new firms from entering the market

the effect of agricultural policy on farmland values the extent to which agricultural support programs have been capitalized into farmland prices has been examined in this study a present value land price model was developed which decomposes returns to the land base into its two possible sources farm production and government subsidies and allows the discount rates associated with these two income sources to vary the empirical results indicate that government payments are discounted less than marketbased returns in ontario thus government payments have been viewed as a more stable source of income to ontario farm operators during the last half century than market based returns

economic consequences of alternative solution methods for centralized unit commitment in day ahead electricity markets many wholesale electricity markets call on the independent system operator iso to determine day ahead schedules for generators based on a centralized unit commitment up until recently the lagrangian relaxation lr algorithm was the only practical means of solving an iso scale unit commitment problem and it was the solution technique used by most isos johnson et al 1 demonstrate however that equity incentive and efficiency issues will arise from use of lr solutions because different commitments that are similar in terms of total system costs can result in different surpluses to individual units recent advances in computing capabilities and optimization algorithms now make solution of the mixed integer programming mip formulation by means of branch and bound b b tractable often with optimality gaps smaller than those of lr algorithms which has led some isos to adopt b b algorithms and others proposing to do so with the move towards b b one obvious question is whether the use of mip will eliminate or reduce the issues with lr raised by johnson et al using actual market data from an iso we demonstrate that both lr and mip solutions will suffer the same equity issues unless the iso unit commitment problems can be solved to complete optimality within the allotted timeframe which is beyond current computational capabilities our results further demonstrate that the size of the payoff deviations are not monotone in the size of the optimality gap meaning smaller optimality gaps from b b will not necessarily mitigate the issues johnson et al raise we show that the use of make whole payments which ensure units recover any startup and no load costs not recovered by inframarginal energy rents can help to reduce surplus volatility and differences to some extent

the interdependence between transmission switching and variable impedance series facts devices high congestion costs and new congestion patterns formed by intermittent renewable generation demand for more efficient utilization of the transmission system transmission switching ts and variable impedance series facts devices are two technologies that provide such efficiency gains through controlling the power flows as the system operators begin to utilize these tools it is essential to understand the interdependence between them at various stages such as planning and operation this paper develops an optimal power flow framework that incorporates both facts and ts to study the link between the two power flow control technologies the simulation results on an rts 96 bus system suggest that 1 substantial economic savings can be achieved through utilization of both ts and facts beyond the independent capabilities of each technology 2 performing ts actions affect the optimal location and set point of facts devices and 3 operation of facts devices affect the location and frequency of ts actions it is thus essential to acknowledge the interdependence between the two technologies both at the planning and operation stage failure to do so will lead to economic inefficiencies that can be avoided through co optimization of generation dispatch ts and facts

stochastic unit commitment with topology control recourse for power systems with large scale renewable integration in this paper we model topology control through transmission switching as a recourse action in the day ahead operation of power systems with large scale renewable generation resources we prove that transmission switching could only reduce the linear objective value of direct current optimal power flow when congestion exists however we also show through a simple example that unit commitment cost could be reduced by transmission switching even in the absence of congestion to solve the stochastic unit commitment with topology control within reasonable computational time we proposed a heuristic that first decomposes a practical system into zones and then solves the problem for each zone in parallel the benefit of topology control recourse is demonstrated on a network representing the central european system we compare the costs of the network with different loading and renewable generation conditions the cost reduction of the test system can reach 3 34 with heavy load and large scale renewable generation while in a single zone the cost reduction can be above 7

dropout school performance and working while in school abstract we develop an econometric model where the determinants of working while in school academic performance and the decision to drop out are set in the context of two types of high school students those who prefer schooling and those who are more likely to join the labor market the likelihood function of this model with heterogeneous preferences for schooling is composed of 48 individual contributions of a standard quadrivariate normal function exploiting a unique canadian microdata set of high school students and school dropouts we show that being a female student attending a private school and living with educated parents are linked to having a strong preference for schooling over the labor market we also find that working fewer than fifteen hours per week while in school is not necessarily detrimental to success in school our results indicate that the decision to drop out is affected by the legal age to access the labor market high minimum wages and low unemployment rates several polic

econometric modeling of the capitalization formula for farmland prices an econometric model is formulated to explain the dynamic behavior in farmland prices a second order rational distributed lag on net crop share rents received by landlords captures the dynamic movements of prices and performs well in conditional post sample forecasts the adjustment path of land prices in response to a perturbation in rents is a protracted dampened cycle the implicitly estimated tax free capitalization rate on rent associated with equilibrium land price is 4 0 neither the expected rate of inflation nor an exponential trend on rent expectations has a significant effect on land prices