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Electricity retailing is the final sale of electricity from generation to the end-use consumer. This is the fourth major step in the electricity delivery process, which also includes generation, transmission and distribution.
In economic terms, electricity is a consumable energy resource capable of being bought, sold, and traded. An electricity market, also power exchange or PX, is a system enabling purchases, through bids to buy; sales, through offers to sell. Bids and offers use supply and demand principles to set the price. Long-term contracts are similar to power purchase agreements and generally considered private bi-lateral transactions between counterparties.
Water supply is the provision of water by public utilities, commercial organisations, community endeavors or by individuals, usually via a system of pumps and pipes. Public water supply systems are crucial to properly functioning societies. These systems are what supply drinking water to populations around the globe. Aspects of service quality include continuity of supply, water quality and water pressure. The institutional responsibility for water supply is arranged differently in different countries and regions. It usually includes issues surrounding policy and regulation, service provision and standardization.
Scottish Power is a vertically integrated energy company based in Glasgow, Scotland. It is a subsidiary of Spanish utility firm Iberdrola.
In the electricity sector in the United Kingdom, the National Grid is the high-voltage electric power transmission network serving Great Britain, connecting power stations and major substations and ensuring that electricity generated anywhere on it can be used to satisfy demand elsewhere. The network covers the great majority of Great Britain and several of the surrounding islands. It does not cover Northern Ireland, which is part of a single electricity market with the Republic of Ireland.
An electricity meter, electric meter, electrical meter, energy meter, or kilowatt-hour meter is a device that measures the amount of electric energy consumed by a residence, a business, or an electrically powered device.
An energy management system (EMS) is a system of computer-aided tools used by operators of electric utility grids to monitor, control, and optimize the performance of the generation or transmission system. Also, it can be used in small scale systems like microgrids. As electric vehicle (EV) charging becomes more popular smaller residential devices that manage when a EV can charge based on the total load vs total capacity of an electrical service are becoming popular.
A Meter Point Administration Number, also known as MPAN, Supply Number or S-Number, is a 21-digit reference used in Great Britain to uniquely identify electricity supply points such as individual domestic residences. The system was introduced in 1998 to aid creation of a competitive environment for the electricity companies, and allows consumers to switch their supplier easily as well as simplifying administration. Although the name suggests that an MPAN refers to a particular meter, an MPAN can have several meters associated with it, or indeed none where it is an unmetered supply. A supply receiving power from the network operator (DNO) has an import MPAN, while generation and microgeneration projects feeding back into the DNO network are given export MPANs.
Economy 7 is the name of a differential tariff provided by United Kingdom electricity suppliers that uses base load generation to provide cheap off-peak electricity during the night.
A smart meter is an electronic device that records information such as consumption of electric energy, voltage levels, current, and power factor. Smart meters communicate the information to the consumer for greater clarity of consumption behavior, and electricity suppliers for system monitoring and customer billing. Smart meters typically record energy near real-time, and report regularly, short intervals throughout the day. Smart meters enable two-way communication between the meter and the central system. Such an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) differs from automatic meter reading (AMR) in that it enables two-way communication between the meter and the supplier. Communications from the meter to the network may be wireless, or via fixed wired connections such as power line carrier (PLC). Wireless communication options in common use include cellular communications, Wi-Fi, wireless ad hoc networks over Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, low power long-range wireless (LoRa), Wize ZigBee, and Wi-SUN.
In electrical engineering, a load profile is a graph of the variation in the electrical load versus time. A load profile will vary according to customer type, temperature and holiday seasons. Power producers use this information to plan how much electricity they will need to make available at any given time. Teletraffic engineering uses a similar load curve.
A virtual power plant (VPP) is a cloud-based distributed power plant that aggregates the capacities of heterogeneous distributed energy resources (DER) for the purposes of enhancing power generation, as well as trading or selling power on the electricity market. Examples of virtual power plants exist in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
Guyana, meaning "land of many waters", is rich in water resources. Most of the population is concentrated in the coastal plain, much of which is below sea level and is protected by a series of sea walls. A series of shallow reservoirs inland of the coastal plain, called "water conservancies", store surface water primarily for irrigation needs. Key issues in the water and sanitation sector in Guyana are poor service quality, a low level of cost recovery and low levels of access.
A wind power forecast corresponds to an estimate of the expected production of one or more wind turbines in the near future, up to a year. Forecast are usually expressed in terms of the available power of the wind farm, occasionally in units of energy, indicating the power production potential over a time interval.
In the United Kingdom, an electricity supplier is a retailer of electricity. For each supply point the supplier has to pay the various costs of transmission, distribution, meter operation, data collection, tax etc. The supplier then adds in energy costs and the supplier's own charge. Regulation of the charging of customers is covered by the industry regulator Ofgem.
Electricity pricing can vary widely by country or by locality within a country. Electricity prices are dependent on many factors, such as the price of power generation, government taxes or subsidies, CO
2 taxes, local weather patterns, transmission and distribution infrastructure, and multi-tiered industry regulation. The pricing or tariffs can also differ depending on the customer-base, typically by residential, commercial, and industrial connections.
A meter operator in the UK energy industry is an organization responsible for installing and maintaining electricity and gas meters. Since 1998 there has been full competition for meter operators, allowing the meter operator for a particular supply to be contracted with the energy supplier by either the supplier's discretion or at the customer's direction. Consumption data from the installed metering is then collected by the appointed data collector to be submitted for billing.
Shape risk in finance is a type of basis risk when hedging a load profile with standard hedging products having a lower granularity. In other words a commodity supplier wants to pre-purchase supplies for expected demand, but can only buy in fixed amounts that are bigger or smaller than the demand forecasted. This means it has to either over order or under order and make up the difference at the time of delivery at the spot price which might be much higher. Shape risk is also related to commodity risk.
The Energy Act 2011 is a UK Act of Parliament relating to UK enterprise law and energy in the UK.
Until relatively recently problems with water supply-demand balance were typically addressed through "supply augmentation", that is to say, building more dams, water treatment stations, etc. As long as water resources were considered abundant and the needs of the natural environment were ignored this reliance on the "engineering paradigm" made sense. Moreover, water utilities and governments have long preferred large capital projects to the less profitable and more difficult challenges of improving system efficiency and demand management. Water demand management came into vogue in the 1990s and 2000s at the same moment dams and similar supply augmentation schemes went out of fashion because they were increasingly seen as overly expensive, damaging to the environment, and socially unjust. Now, in the 2020s, it is accurate to say that demand management is the dominant approach in the richer countries of North America and Europe, but is also becoming more popular in less affluent countries and regions.
References
- "Simple Guide to Market Entry" (PDF). Elexon. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 10, 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
