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This paper studies the dynamics of concentration in the Spanish market for the provision of urban water service by private contract operators in the 2000–2020 period. The market is highly concentrated. Concentration increased until 2007, at which point it started to decline when Law 30/2007 on Public Sector Contracts and Organic Law 8/2007 on Political Party Financing were passed; before rising again from 2016 onwards. This latter trend results from strategic behaviour by the two leading operators, acquiring smaller companies with a notable presence in some regional markets. Further legislative reforms aimed at safeguarding space for competition are thus proposed. • The Spanish market for the private provision of urban water service is highly concentrated. • Concentration declined when Law 30/2007 on Public Sector Contracts and Organic Law 8/2007 on Political Party Financing were passed in 2007. • Concentration rose again from 2016 onwards following the acquisition of smaller operators by the two large market players. • Accordingly, some recommendations for further policies aimed at boosting competition for this market are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A MILP is set to ex-post optimise the Interruptible Load program in Spain. • Consideration of real technical and regulatory constraints. • Definition of a series of metrics to compare the optimal performance of programs. • Recommendation to design and operate Interruptible Load programs. • The optimal usage of the resource could have saved the system a total of 163 M€. The deployment of demand response in reserve markets has been widely discussed. Interruptible Load programs contract demand capacity from consumers in exchange for fixed and variable payments. System operators contract these resources to increase system resilience and use them for economic purposes. Although common, no ex-post evaluations of the program's performance and efficiency exists in the literature. To fill this gap, the paper presents a procedure to evaluate the optimal usage of these resources from a system operator perspective. A Mixed Integer Linear Problem is set to minimise the overall cost of the system using the participant demand resources in the tertiary reserve market, while ensuring that all technical and regulatory constraints are fulfilled in the evaluation. The proposed method describes a series of metrics to compare the optimal performance with the current scenario, and we draw a set of conclusions and policy recommendations from it. We apply the method to the Spanish Interruptible Load program. Our results show that during the five and a half years of the program, demand resources could have provided savings to the system of up to 23% of the cost of tertiary reserve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]