Pool Market Research Articles

Energy and ancillary service dispatch for the interim ISO New England electricity market

Since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) order no. 888 has mandated the establishment of unbundled electricity markets in the newly deregulated environment, competitive bidding of ancillary services, along with bidding of energy, becomes increasingly important. In this paper, an optimization-based framework for solving a multi-commodity electricity market dispatch problem is presented. In compliance with New England Power Pool (NEPOOL) Market Rules and Procedures, a hybrid dispatch method which combines the sequential dispatch method with the joint dispatch method is proposed to solve the energy and ancillary dispatch problem for ISO New England (ISO-NE). Numerical results on a 6-unit test system and the 324-unit ISO-NE system are included.

Offering customers direct access: Using choice to stimulate competition

The essential elements for a system of customer direct access to electricity supplies are already in place, with protocols for existing pool operation and inter-system coordination, as well as the Western System Power Pool market. Extending our experience with gas and electricity wholesale markets to direct access for large retail electricity customers, then to small customers, is achievable now.

Uncertainty considerations in the pool purchase price in the England and Wales electricity supply industry

Since 31 March 1990, the new commercial agreements have begun to work as part of the new scheme of privatisation of the electricity supply industry in England and Wales. This privatisation involved the entire reshaping of the industry into a competitive market in generation with final customers able to choose between suppliers of electricity. The transmission and distribution functions are considered monopolies, because it is not economical, and not necessary to duplicate lines, while the generation and energy supply functions have been put into a free market where competition is their main characteristic. The basic commercial mechanism for trading in this market (pool) is the contracts and, on a small scale, the everyday purchases. The prices for all of them are related to the pool purchase price (PPP). The studies presented in this paper review the present England and Wales pool (EWP) approach used to assess the PPP, identifies its weaknesses and proposes solutions. An analytical model is developed in which the uncertainties are modelled and the reliability concept is included. The present EWP approach is identified as one particular case of this general model. The EWP system with 234 units is assessed, the results presented, and conclusions drawn. >

Optimal Market Pools for Agricultural Cooperatives

AbstractMost agricultural marketing cooperatives distribute members' net revenues on a pool basis. The present paper outlines various pool options and provides a framework for identifying privately and collectively optimal pooling rules. Individual members' pool choices are found to vary according to farm enterprise and risk aversion level. A collectively optimal rule depends generally on risk aversion and on the method used to aggregate individuals' expressed preferences. In the instance examined here, however, the collective optimum is somewhat insensitive to assumed risk aversion.

HIGH TECHNOLOGY POLICY AND THE SILICON VALLEY MODEL: AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE

Australia seeks to emerge from the depths of recession and to break free from the syndrome of giving ever-increasing protection to a decaying manufacturing sector, by encouraging high technology industry. Silicon Valley, the home of much of the world's semiconductor industry, is often seen as the appropriate model for the development of such industry. For those used to dealing with the siting and encouragement of conventional industry, it can seem that high technology industry, with no heavy raw material input or bulky product output and requiring no large labour pool or local market, in fact has no special requirements at all. Others look to the Silicon Valley model and plan science or technology parks to reproduce the factors they believe responsible for that phenomenon. For example, great emphasis is generally placed on proximity to universities, apparently in ignorance of the very minor role universities played in the growth of the semiconductor industry, and of the great practical divide between science and technology. Vital factors, such as the ready information flow achieved by high mobility of those in high technology industry, are ignored. The Australian situation is complicated further by competition among the States to attract high technology industry, a competition that tends to emasculate national policy. Yet this situation is really just a local representation of what is happening internationally among countries and among regions within those countries. This desperation to leap blindly into high technology, whatever it is and whatever the cost, by following a model that is scarcely understood, is unlikely to produce the huge rewards so many policy makers anticipate are so readily available.

The Development of a Capitalistic Labour Market in Canada

It has been the custom of economists since the Mercantilists to assume the existence of a capitalistic labour market. It appears that this abstraction was adopted, not from ignorance of labour conditions–Malthus, who sponsored the bleakest model of a labour market, after all possessed exceptional knowledge of contemporary social conditions–but because it simplified the economists' main task, as they conceived it, of expounding how a capitalist economy works. The abstraction had the disadvantage, however, of diverting attention from how a capitalistic labour market might develop. This question, besides its historical and sociological interest, is relevant to the study of labour markets, and of “economic development.” Yet, in Canada, it has received only brief attention. This paper proposes a more detailed view of how our capitalistic labour market arose.By a capitalistic market is meant one in which the actions of workers and employers are governed and linked by impersonal considerations of immediate pecuniary advantage. In this market, the employer is confident that workers will be available whenever he wants them; so he feels free to hire them on a short-term basis, and to dismiss them whenever there is a monetary advantage in doing so. Hence, the employer takes no responsibility for the workers' overhead costs: labour, to the employer, is a variable cost. From a broader viewpoint, the capitalistic labour market represents a pooling of the labour supplies and labour needs of many employers, so that all of them may benefit by economizing on labour reserves. Economy is possible because the labour requirements of employers collectively are less than those of employers individually, to the extent that short-term needs for labour dovetail, and to the extent that a worker can stand as a reserve to many employers. When the demand and supply conditions of labour are dependable enough to permit this pooling, the overhead costs of labour can be transferred from individual employers to the market, that is, to the workers themselves and to the community at large. The essential historical aspect of the capitalistic labour market, then, is the development of the supply and demand conditions that will support it. Two questions are especially critical: How are workers induced to flow into the labour market pool? And how are they prevented from flowing out again?