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Long-term contracting is the traditional governance mechanism to deal with the transaction costs associated with the specificity of gas industry assets. Long-term contracts have been often used to allocate risks among players, and to that end, they often include take-or-pay provisions. These clauses specify that buyers take the volume risk, as they are obliged to pay for a minimum amount of gas consumption. In exchange, buyers pay a predefined price, supposedly lower than the risk-neutral expectation of short-term gas prices. In that view, if the buyer is able to resell that gas in the short term, the contract is an effective hedge against short-term volatility. Otherwise, the contract does not act as a hedge but it becomes a sunk cost. The corresponding power producers' behavior involves not only output decisions but also financial decisions. To analyze that situation, this paper develops a new quantitative methodology that allows comparing risk-neutral valuations of gas and power markets decisions. We test the model in a real-size system, and show the additional cost of the power system associated with a possible illiquidity of the short-term gas market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By the introduction of competitive supply, modern electric utilities are forced to operate their systems closer to their security limits. Under such fragile conditions, any disturbance could endanger system security and lead to system collapse. There is, therefore, a need to develop new methods which could evaluate optimal scheduling of operating reserve and forewarn the system operators to take necessary preventive actions in case need arises. An effective method is proposed in this paper to optimally allocate spinning reserve based on a well-being model. The method used in conventional well-being framework for classifying power system comfort zone into healthy and marginal states is initially revised. The optimal value of health index and system spinning reserve requirements are then evaluated on the basis of a trade off between the total cost of spinning reserve and the expected cost of energy not served. The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined using the IEEE-RTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach for the allocation of transmission network costs by controlling the nodal electricity prices. The proposed approach introduces generation and nodal injection penalties into the traditional economic dispatch so as to create nodal price differences that recover the required transmission revenue from the resulting congestion rent. As a consequence, the new electricity prices reflect not only the marginal costs of production subject to transmission constraints but also the capital costs of the network. This is the approach commonly adopted with most commodities whose price includes the unit cost of the good itself as well as the transportation cost from the production centers to the final consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different regulatory frameworks have implemented competitive mechanisms to increase efficiency in transmission, a natural monopoly. Conflicts of interest and hidden costs make necessary to define methods to obtain an appropriate valuation of new transmission assets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We describe the new method used in Chile to allocate transmission charges among generating companies and customers, as defined in Law 19940 of March 2004 (also known as Ley Corta or Short Law). We show that the new Chilean transmission charge scheme is a hybrid based on marginal cost pricing, identification of use through economic benefits and flow identification methods, and last, a postage stamp to redistribute almost all the charges that customers have to pay. We also estimate the direct per kilowatthour charge that customers will pay and discuss its effect on location and expansion signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]