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Winter storm Uri brought severe cold to the southern United States in February 2021, causing a cascading failure of interdependent systems in Texas where infrastructure was not adequately prepared for such cold. In particular, the failure of interconnected energy systems restricted electricity supply just as demand for heating spiked, leaving millions of Texans without heat or electricity, many for several days. This motivates the question: did historical storms suggest that such temperatures were known to occur, and if so with what frequency? We compute a temperature-based proxy for heating demand and use this metric to answer the question ‘what would the aggregate demand for heating have been had historic cold snaps occurred with today’s population?’. We find that local temperatures and the inferred demand for heating per capita across the region served by the Texas Interconnection were more severe during a storm in December 1989 than during February 2021, and that cold snaps in 1951 and 1983 were nearly as severe. Given anticipated population growth, future storms may lead to even greater infrastructure failures if adaptive investments are not made. Further, electricity system managers should prepare for trends in electrification of heating to drive peak annual loads on the Texas Interconnection during severe winter storms.

Electricity markets are designed to provide reliable electricity at least cost to consumers. This paper describes how the best designs satisfy the twin goals of short-run efficiency—making the best use of existing resources—and long-run efficiency—promoting efficient investment in new resources. The core elements are a day-ahead market for optimal scheduling of resources and a real-time market for security-constrained economic dispatch. Resources directly offer to produce per their underlying economics and then the system operator centrally optimizes all resources to maximize social welfare. Locational marginal prices, reflecting the marginal value of energy at each time and location, are used in settlement. This spot market provides the basis for forward contracting, which enables participants to manage risk and improves bidding incentives in the spot market. There are important differences in electricity markets around the world, reflecting different economic and political settings. Electricity markets are undergoing a transformation as the resource mix transitions from fossil fuels to renewables. The main renewables, wind and solar, are intermittent, have zero marginal cost, and lack inertia. These challenges can be met with battery storage and improved demand response. However, good governance is needed to assure the market rules adapt to meet new challenges.

We estimate the effects of electricity shortages on Indian manufacturers, instrumenting with supply shifts from hydroelectric power availability. We estimate that India y s average reported level of shortages reduces the average plant's revenues and producer surplus by 5 to 10 percent, but average productivity losses are significantly smaller because most inputs can be stored during outages. Shortages distort the plant size distribution, as there are significant economies of scale in generator costs and shortages more severely affect plants without generators. Simulations show that offering interruptible retail electricity contracts could substantially reduce the impacts of shortages.

This paper proposes a framework to extract appropriate locational marginal prices for each type of reserve (up-/down-going reserves at both generation- and demand-sides). The proposed reserve pricing scheme accounts for the lost opportunity of selling the convertible products (energy and reserve). The fair prices can be obtained for capacity reserves applying this framework, since this framework assigns the same prices to the same services provided at the same location. The proposed reserve pricing scheme provides all the market participants with the appropriate signals to modify their offers according to the system operator requirements. The pricing problem is decomposed to different hourly sub-problems considering the bounding constraints. To show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, it is applied to the IEEE reliability test system and the results are discussed.

Encouraged by the declining cost of grid-scale renewables, recent analyses conclude that the United States could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at relatively low cost using currently available technologies. While the cost of renewable generation has declined dramatically, integrating these renewables would require a large expansion in transmission to deliver that power. Already there is growing evidence that the United States has insufficient transmission capacity, and current levels of annual investment are well below what would be required for a renewables-dominated system. We describe a variety of challenges that make it difficult to build new transmission and potential policy responses to mitigate them, as well as possible substitutes for some new transmission capacity.

The supply of intermittent wind and solar generation with zero marginal operating cost is increasingly rapidly in the US. These changes are creating challenges for wholesale markets in two dimensions. Short-term energy and ancillary services markets, built upon mid-twentieth century models of optimal pricing and investment, which now work reasonably well, must accommodate the supply variability and energy market price impacts associated with intermittent generation at scale. These developments raise more profound questions about whether the current market designs can be adapted to provide good long-term price signals to support investment in an efficient portfolio of generating capacity and storage consistent with public policy goals. The recent experience of the California ISO (CAISO) is used to illustrate the impact of intermittent generation on supply patterns, supply variability, and market-based energy prices. Reforms in capacity markets and scarcity pricing mechanisms are needed if policy-makers seek to adapt the traditional wholesale market designs to accommodate intermittent generation at scale. However, if the rapid growth of integrated resource planning, subsidies for some technologies but not others, mandated long term contracts, and other expansions of state regulation continue, more fundamental changes are likely to be required in the institutions that determine generator and storage entry and exit decisions.

Many marine animals have evolved sensory abilities to use electric and magnetic cues in essential aspects of life history, such as to detect prey, predators and mates as well as to orientate and migrate. Potential disruption of vital cues by human activities must be understood in order to mitigate potential negative influences. Cable deployments in coastal waters are increasing worldwide, in capacity and number, owing to growing demands for electrical power and telecommunications. Increasingly, the local electromagnetic environment used by electro- and magneto-sensitive species will be altered. We quantified biologically relevant behavioural responses of the presumed, magneto-receptive American lobster and the electro-sensitive Little skate to electromagnetic field (EMF) emissions of a subsea high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission cable for domestic electricity supply. We demonstrate a striking increase in exploratory/foraging behaviour in skates in response to EMF and a more subtle exploratory response in lobsters. In addition, by directly measuring both the magnetic and electric field components of the EMF emitted by HVDC cables we found that there were DC and unexpectedly AC components. Modelling, restricted to the DC component, showed good agreement with measured results. Our cross-disciplinary study highlights the need to integrate an understanding of the natural and anthropogenic EMF environment together with the responses of sensitive animals when planning future cable deployments and predicting their environmental effects.

Nowadays most consumers are aware of the European dimensions of their electricity supply. But what ideas lie behind this European network? In constructing electricity networks, \"Europe\" performed a Janus-faced function. On the one hand, a European network would bolster economic growth and peace. On the other, economic growth through electrification would increase military potential. By combining a wide array of rarely used sources, this book unravels how engineers, industrialists, and policymakers used ideas of Europe to gain support for building a European system. By focussing on transnational and European actors, this book is a valuable addition to existing national histories of electrification. It is an original contribution to the history of technology, while also making the role of technology visible in more mainstream European history. The empirical chapters show how ideas of European cooperation in general became intertwined with network- planning during the Interwar period, although the Depression and WWII prevented a European electricity network from being constructed. The subsequent chapters describe the influence of the Marshall Plan on European network-building, focussing on both its economic and military aspects. The last chapter portrays how the Iron Curtain was contested. The troubled expansion of networks and capacity in Western Europe provided an underpinning for politcal rapprochement with the East in the 1970s and 1980s. Political and economic turmoil after 1989 accelerated this process, leading to an interconnected European system by 1995.

This paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing South Africa's mass roll-out of electricity to rural households. Using several new data sources and two different identification strategies (an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach), I find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years. This new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women, while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings. Several pieces of evidence suggest that household electrification raises employment by releasing women from home production and enabling microenterprises. Migration behavior may also be affected.