Related Research Articles
Microeconomics is a branch of mainstream economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the national economy as whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.
A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if the total cost of one firm, producing the total output, is lower than the total cost of two or more firms producing the entire production. In that case, it is very probable that a company (monopoly) or minimal number of companies (oligopoly) will form, providing all or most relevant products and/or services. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating large economies of scale about the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services, electricity, telecommunications, mail, etc. Natural monopolies were recognized as potential sources of market failure as early as the 19th century; John Stuart Mill advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good.
A public utility company is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service. Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and regulation ranging from local community-based groups to statewide government monopolies.
Energy economics is a broad scientific subject area which includes topics related to supply and use of energy in societies. Considering the cost of energy services and associated value gives economic meaning to the efficiency at which energy can be produced. Energy services can be defined as functions that generate and provide energy to the “desired end services or states”. The efficiency of energy services is dependent on the engineered technology used to produce and supply energy. The goal is to minimise energy input required to produce the energy service, such as lighting (lumens), heating (temperature) and fuel. The main sectors considered in energy economics are transportation and building, although it is relevant to a broad scale of human activities, including households and businesses at a microeconomic level and resource management and environmental impacts at a macroeconomic level.
Automatic meter reading (AMR) is the technology of automatically collecting consumption, diagnostic, and status data from water meter or energy metering devices and transferring that data to a central database for billing, troubleshooting, and analyzing. This technology mainly saves utility providers the expense of periodic trips to each physical location to read a meter. Another advantage is that billing can be based on near real-time consumption rather than on estimates based on past or predicted consumption. This timely information coupled with analysis can help both utility providers and customers better control the use and production of electric energy, gas usage, or water consumption.
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.
Net metering is an electricity billing mechanism that allows consumers who generate some or all of their own electricity to use that electricity anytime, instead of when it is generated. This is particularly important with renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which are non-dispatchable. Monthly net metering allows consumers to use solar power generated during the day at night, or wind from a windy day later in the month. Annual net metering rolls over a net kilowatt-hour (kWh) credit to the following month, allowing solar power that was generated in July to be used in December, or wind power from March in August.
Municipalization is the transfer of private entities, assets, service providers, or corporations to public ownership by a municipality, including a city, county, or public utility district ownership. The transfer may be from private ownership or from other levels of government. It is the opposite of privatization and is different from nationalization. The term municipalization largely refers to the transfer of ownership of utilities from Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) to public ownership, and operation, by local government whether that be at the city, county or state level. While this is most often applied to electricity it can also refer to solar energy, water, sewer, trash, natural gas or other services.
Demand response is a change in the power consumption of an electric utility customer to better match the demand for power with the supply. Until recently electric energy could not be easily stored, so utilities have traditionally matched demand and supply by throttling the production rate of their power plants, taking generating units on or off line, or importing power from other utilities. There are limits to what can be achieved on the supply side, because some generating units can take a long time to come up to full power, some units may be very expensive to operate, and demand can at times be greater than the capacity of all the available power plants put together. Demand response seeks to adjust the demand for power instead of adjusting the supply.
A flat fee, also referred to as a flat rate or a linear rate refers to a pricing structure that charges a single fixed fee for a service, regardless of usage. Less commonly, the term may refer to a rate that does not vary with usage or time of use.
A feed-in tariff is a policy mechanism designed to accelerate investment in renewable energy technologies by offering long-term contracts to renewable energy producers. This means promising renewable energy producers an above market price and providing price certainty and long-term contracts that help finance renewable energy investments. Typically, FITs award different prices to different sources of renewable energy in order to encourage development of one technology over another. For example, technologies such as wind power and solar PV are awarded a higher price per kWh than tidal power. FITs often include a "degression": a gradual decrease of the price or tariff in order to follow and encourage technological cost reductions.
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.
Irrigation in Colombia has been an integral part of Colombia's agricultural and rural development in the 20th Century. Public investment in irrigation has been especially prominent in the first half of the Century. During the second half, largely driven by fiscal shortages and a common inability to raise sufficient revenues from collection of water charges, the Colombian government adopted a program to devolve irrigation management responsibility to water users associations. Irrigation management transfer has occurred only partially in Colombia, as the government has maintained strong managerial tasks in certain irrigation districts.
Irrigation is the artificial exploitation and distribution of water at project level aiming at application of water at field level to agricultural crops in dry areas or in periods of scarce rainfall to assure or improve crop production.
This article discusses organizational forms and means of management of irrigation water at project (system) level.
A water tariff is a price assigned to water supplied by a public utility through a piped network to its customers. The term is also often applied to wastewater tariffs. Water and wastewater tariffs are not charged for water itself, but to recover the costs of water treatment, water storage, transporting it to customers, collecting and treating wastewater, as well as billing and collection. Prices paid for water itself are different from water tariffs. They exist in a few countries and are called water abstraction charges or fees. Abstraction charges are not covered in this article, but in the article on water pricing). Water tariffs vary widely in their structure and level between countries, cities and sometimes between user categories. The mechanisms to adjust tariffs also vary widely.
Water pricing is a term that covers various processes to assign a price to water. These processes differ greatly under different circumstances.
The Energy efficiency implementation industry branch comprises firms which retrofit or replace inefficient equipment with more efficient parts or equipment, with the goal of reducing energy consumption. Retrofitting enhances existing equipment by making it expend less energy, complete replacement of equipment may be more costly, but can reduce the implementation complexity. The common goal is to save kilowatts (kW) and kilowatt hours (kWh). The difference between these two measurements is that one is a power rating (kW) and the other is a measurement of energy actually consumed (kWh).
Sustainable energy management in the wastewater sector applies the concept of sustainable management to the energy involved in the treatment of wastewater. The energy used by the wastewater sector is usually the largest portion of energy consumed by the urban water and wastewater utilities. The rising costs of electricity, the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions of the energy sector and the growing need to mitigate global warming, are driving wastewater utilities to rethink their energy management, adopting more energy efficient technologies and processes and investing in on-site renewable energy generation.
A multi-year rate plan (MRP) is an approved price that public utilities will charge consumers over a multi-year period. As of 2019, 17 different states have used multi-year rate plans.
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
- 1 2 Prindle, Zarnikau & Allis 2010, p. 217.
- ↑ Yacov Tsur (30 September 2010). Pricing Irrigation Water: Principles and Cases from Developing Countries. Routledge. pp. 165–. ISBN 978-1-136-52375-5.
- ↑ Thomas, Manoj T.; Ballabh, Vishwa (11 March 2008). "Recovery of Irrigation User Cess and Governance of Canal Systems". In Vishwa Ballabh (ed.). Governance of Water: Institutional Alternatives and Political Economy. SAGE Publishing India. p. 98. ISBN 9789352800971.
- ↑ Giannoccaro, Giacomo; Prosperi, Maurizio; Giacomo, Zanni (2010). "Assessing water pricing policies to enhance water efficiency in agriculture" (PDF). Ambientalia. ISSN 1699-3063.
- ↑ Borenstein 2016.
