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The City Electric
Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania
Michael Degani
Duke University Press, 2022
Over the last twenty years of neoliberal reform, the power supply in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s metropolis, has become less reliable even as its importance has increased. Though mobile phones, televisions, and refrigerators have flooded the city, the electricity required to run these devices is still supplied by the socialist-era energy company Tanesco, which is characterized by increased fees, aging infrastructure, and a sluggish bureaucracy. While some residents contemplate off-grid solutions, others repair, extend, or tap into the state network with the assistance of freelance electricians or moonlighting utility employees. In The City Electric Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state. Moving from the politics of generation contracts down to the street-level experience of blackouts and disconnection patrols, he reveals the logics of infrastructural modification and their effects on everyday life. As politicians, residents, electricians, and utility inspectors all redistribute flows of payment and power, they reframe the energy grid both as a technical system and as an ongoing experiment in collective interdependence.
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Economic Evaluation of Projects in the Electricity Supply Industry
Hisham Khatib
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
In the highly capital-intensive electricity supply industry, it is essential that both engineers and managers understand the methodologies of project evaluation in order to comprehend and analyse investment proposals and decisions. This updated and expanded edition of Economic Evaluation of Projects in the Electricity Supply Industry takes a broad introductory approach, covering planning and investment, financial analysis and evaluation, risk management, electricity trading, and strategies, technologies, national requirements and global agreements for electricity generation in a carbon-constrained world.
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Economic Evaluation of Projects in the Electricity Supply Industry
Hisham Khatib
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003
In the highly capital-intensive electricity supply industry, it is essential that both engineers and managers understand the methodologies of project evaluation in order to comprehend and analyse investment proposals and decisions. This fully revised and updated edition of Economic Evaluation of Projects in the Electricity Supply Industry (1996) takes a broad introductory approach, covering market and environmental issues, financial analysis and evaluation, and clean environmental technologies and costs. New topics include electricity trading and risk management, evolving electricity utilities and new and future generation technologies in a carbon-constrained world.
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The Electric City
Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930
Harold L. Platt
University of Chicago Press, 1991
No symbol of progress in our century is more galvanizing than electricity—electric power and the technology it has spawned. The "invisible world" of electric energy that was emerging at the turn of the century is one we take for granted, but its influence on the growth and quality of city life was, and remains, profound. Using Chicago as a test case, Harold L. Platt investigates the emergence of an urban-based, energy-intensive society over the course of half a century in this first book-length history of energy use in the city.
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Electricity Deregulation
Choices and Challenges
Edited by James M. Griffin and Steven L. Puller
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The electricity market has experienced enormous setbacks in delivering on the promise of deregulation. In theory, deregulating the electricity market would increase the efficiency of the industry by producing electricity at lower costs and passing those cost savings on to customers. As Electricity Deregulation shows, successful deregulation is possible, although it is by no means a hands-off process—in fact, it requires a substantial amount of design and regulatory oversight.

This collection brings together leading experts from academia, government, and big business to discuss the lessons learned from experiences such as California's market meltdown as well as the ill-conceived policy choices that contributed to those failures. More importantly, the essays that comprise Electricity Deregulation offer a number of innovative prescriptions for the successful design of deregulated electricity markets. Written with economists and professionals associated with each of the network industries in mind, this comprehensive volume provides a timely and astute deliberation on the many risks and rewards of electricity deregulation.
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Electricity Economics and Planning
T.W. Berrie
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1992
This book is unique in gathering under one over all the elements of electricity economics and planning, both for the traditional approach and for the new developments of the 1990s, e.g. privatisation, competition, deregulation and more efficient markets and pricing. All the fundamental institutional aspects of electricity in the 1990s are also discussed, particularly relevant at a time when the utilities of the developed world are being restructured, those of the ex-centrally planned economies are being profoundly reorganised and those of developing countries have enormous debt problems. The book describes how these challenges of the 1990s are to be understood and met.
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Planning as Persuasive Storytelling
The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago's Electric Future
James A. Throgmorton
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Planning as Persuasive Storytelling is a revealing look at the world of political conflict surrounding the Commonwealth Edison Company's ambitious nuclear power plant construction program in northern Illinois during the 1980s. Examining the clash between the utility, consumer groups, community-based groups, the Illinois Commerce Commission, and the City of Chicago, Throgmorton argues that planning can best be thought of as a form of persuasive storytelling. A planner's task is to write future-oriented texts that employ language and figures of speech designed to persuade their constituencies of the validity of their vision. Juxtaposing stories about efforts to construct Chicago's electric future, Planning as Persuasive Storytelling suggests a shift in how we think about planning. In order to account for the fragmented and conflicted nature of contemporary American life and politics, that shift would be away from "science" and the "experts" and toward rhetoric and storytelling.
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Pollution, Politics, and Power
The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity
Thomas O. McGarity
Harvard University Press, 2019

The electric power industry has been transformed over the past forty years, becoming more reliable and resilient while meeting environmental goals. A big question now is how to prevent backsliding.

Pollution, Politics, and Power tells the story of the remarkable transformation of the electric power industry over the last four decades. Electric power companies have morphed from highly polluting regulated monopolies into competitive, deregulated businesses that generate, transmit, and distribute cleaner electricity. Power companies are investing heavily in natural gas and utility-scale renewable resources and have stopped building new coal-fired plants. They facilitate end-use efficiency and purchase excess electricity produced by rooftop solar panels and backyard wind turbines, helping to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

But these beneficial changes have come with costs. The once-powerful coal industry is on the edge of ruin, with existing coal-fired plants closing and coal mines shutting down. As a result, communities throughout Appalachia suffer from high unemployment and reduced resources, which have exacerbated a spiraling opioid epidemic. The Trump administration’s efforts to revive the coal industry by scaling back environmental controls and reregulating electricity prices have had little effect on the coal industry’s decline.

Major advances therefore come with warning signs, which we must heed in charting the continuing course of sustainable electricity. In Pollution, Politics, and Power, Thomas O. McGarity examines the progress made, details lessons learned, and looks to the future with suggestions for building a more sustainable grid while easing the economic downsides of coal’s demise.

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Power after Carbon
Building a Clean, Resilient Grid
Peter Fox-Penner
Harvard University Press, 2020

As the electric power industry faces the challenges of climate change, technological disruption, new market imperatives, and changing policies, a renowned energy expert offers a roadmap to the future of this essential sector.

As the damaging and costly impacts of climate change increase, the rapid development of sustainable energy has taken on great urgency. The electricity industry has responded with necessary but wrenching shifts toward renewables, even as it faces unprecedented challenges and disruption brought on by new technologies, new competitors, and policy changes. The result is a collision course between a grid that must provide abundant, secure, flexible, and affordable power, and an industry facing enormous demands for power and rapid, systemic change.

The fashionable solution is to think small: smart buildings, small-scale renewables, and locally distributed green energy. But Peter Fox-Penner makes clear that these will not be enough to meet our increasing needs for electricity. He points instead to the indispensability of large power systems, battery storage, and scalable carbon-free power technologies, along with the grids and markets that will integrate them. The electric power industry and its regulators will have to provide all of these, even as they grapple with changing business models for local electric utilities, political instability, and technological change. Power after Carbon makes sense of all the moving parts, providing actionable recommendations for anyone involved with or relying on the electric power system.

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Power to People
The Inside Story of AES and the Globalization of Electricity
Peter Grose
Island Press, 2007
In the late 1990s, while Enron was flying high, a smaller power company flew under the radar. AES was founded in 1981 according to a different set of principles—fiscally conservative investment strategies paired with the belief that business can be both fun and socially responsible.
 
When Roger Sant arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1974, industry and government were focused on securing ever more oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy, not on efficiency. Sant, who left a teaching position at Stanford’s business school to become assistant administrator of the Federal Energy Administration, was committed to changing the focus. With his colleague Dennis Bakke and a handful of investors, Sant founded AES, an upstart energy service company that would ultimately help transform the industry. The company was built on Sant and Bakke’s ideals: a healthy work environment, a healthy natural environment, and efficient electricity generation and delivery at an affordable price. AES seized the opportunities created by deregulation of the electricity industry, breaking free of an energy infrastructure dating back to Thomas Edison’s day. While Enron and many others stumbled, AES proved itself able to survive and often to thrive. Rapid growth would become the company’s greatest challenge, yet through exhilarating highs and disappointing lows, AES has maintained its founders’ original vision of electricity generation that sustains workers, consumers, and the environment.
 
Power to People is the story of electricity privatization, expanding global markets, and the transformation of an industry. It is also proof of the electrifying combination of innovation and good citizenship.
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Reaping the Wind
How Mechanical Wizards, Visionaries, and Profiteers Helped Shape Our Energy Future
Peter Asmus
Island Press, 2000
From the solitary windmill standing sentry over a rural homestead to the sleek machinery of a modern wind farm, windmills are a powerful symbol of self-reliance and human ingenuity. Once the province of backyard tinkerers and eccentric inventors, they have over the past two decades entered the mainstream to be embraced by environmentalists, venture capitalists, and policymakers alike. But reaching that point wasn't easy.In Reaping the Wind, journalist Peter Asmus tells the fascinating and convoluted history of commercial wind power in the United States. He introduces readers to maverick scientists and technologists who labored in obscurity, to entrepreneurs and visionary capitalists who believed that a centuries-old idea could be made feasible in the modern world, and to enterprising financial advisers and investors who sought to exploit the last great tax shelter in federal history. Beginning with the early pioneers, from William Heronemus, a former U.S. Navy captain who dreamt of huge floating wind farms off the coast of New England, to the $40 million success story of Jim Dehlsen of Zond, he offers an animated narrative that profiles the colorful cast of characters involved with the development of the American wind power industry.Reaping the Wind is both engaging and instructive, with information about the technologies and policies that drive the industry and give it promise interwoven with the human story of the struggle to develop -- against great odds -- reliable, clean energy from a source as unpredictable and seemingly uncontrollable as the wind. Anyone interested in renewable energy or the human and political drama behind the development of new technologies will find the book an engrossing and enlightening read.
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Reinventing Electric Utilities
Competition, Citizen Action, and Clean Power
Ed Smeloff and Peter Asmus; Foreword by Amory Lovins
Island Press, 1997

Traditionally protected as monopolies, electric utilities are now being caught in the fervor for deregulation that is sweeping the country. Nearly forty states have enacted or are considering laws and regulations that will profoundly alter the way the electric utility industry is governed. Concerned citizens are beginning to ponder the environmental implications of such a change, and while many fear that the pressure of competition will exacerbate environmental problems, others argue that deregulation provides a tremendous opportunity for citizens to work toward promoting cleaner energy and a more sustainable way of life.

In Reinventing Electric Utilities, Ed Smeloff and Peter Asmus consider the challenges for citizens and the utility industry in this new era of competition. Through an in-depth case study of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), a once-troubled utility that is now widely regarded as a model for energy efficiency and renewable energy development, they explore the changes that have occurred in the utility industry, and the implications of those changes for the future. The SMUD portrait is complemented by regional case studies of Portland General Electric and the Washington Public Power Supply System, the New England Electric Service, Northern States Power, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, and others that highlight the efforts of citizen groups and utilities to eliminate unproductive and environmentally damaging sources of power and to promote the use of new, cleaner energy technologies.

The authors present and explain some of the fundamental principles that govern restructuring, while acknowledging that solutions will depend upon the unique resource needs, culture, and utility structure of each particular region. Smeloff and Asmus argue that any politically sustainable restructuring of the electric services industry must address the industry's high capital cost commitments and environmental burdens.

Throughout, they make the case that with creative leadership, open and competitive markets, and the active participation of citizens, this upheaval offers a unique opportunity for electric utilities to lessen the burden of electricity production on the environment and reduce the cost of electric services through the use of more competitive, cleaner power sources.

While neither technological innovation nor the magic of the market will in and of itself reinvent the electric utility industry, the influence of those dynamic forces must be understood. Reinventing Electric Utilities is an important work for policymakers, energy professionals, and anyone concerned about the future of the electric services industry.

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Scenarios for a Future Electricity Supply
Cost-optimised variations on supplying Europe and its neighbours with electricity from renewable energies
Gregor Czisch
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2011
This book pursues the fundamental idea of using renewable energies in a rational and economic way in order to develop a climate-friendly electricity supply. As the most cost efficient solution, an electricity network for the whole of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia must be found. The sources of renewable and partly decentralised electricity generation could be connected in a comprehensive power supply to meet the electricity needs of an entire region.
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Selling Power
Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940
John L. Neufeld
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We remember Thomas Edison as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, but he deserves credit for something much larger, an even more singular invention that profoundly changed the way the world works: the modern electric utility industry. Edison’s light bulb was the first to work within a system where a utility generated electricity and distributed it to customers for lighting. The story of how electric utilities went within one generation from prototype to an indispensable part of most Americans’ lives is a story about the relationships between political and technological change.
           
John L. Neufeld offers a comprehensive historical treatment of the economics that shaped electric utilities. Compared with most industries, the organization of the electric utility industry is not—and cannot be—economically efficient. Most industries are kept by law in a state of fair competition, but the capital necessary to start an electric company—generators, transmission and distribution systems, and land and buildings—is so substantial that few companies can enter the market and compete. Therefore, the natural state of the electric utility industry since its inception has been a monopoly subject to government oversight. These characteristics of electric utilities—and electricity’s importance—have created over time sharp political controversies, and changing public policies have dramatically changed the industry’s structure to an extent matched by few other industries. Neufeld outlines the struggles that shaped the industry’s development, and shows how the experience of electric utilities provides insight into the design of economic institutions, including today’s new large-scale markets.
 
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Smart Power Anniversary Edition
Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities
Peter Fox-Penner
Island Press, 2014
Few industries in the U.S. are as stuck in the past as our utilities are. In the face of growing challenges from climate change and the need for energy security, a system and a business model that each took more than a century to evolve must now be extensively retooled in the span of a few decades. Despite the need, many of the technologies and institutions needed are still being designed or tested. It is like rebuilding our entire airplane fleet, along with our runways and air traffic control system, while the planes are all up in the air filled with passengers.

In this accessible and insightful book, Peter Fox-Penner considers how utilities interact with customers and how the Smart Grid could revolutionize their relationship. Turning to the supply side, he considers the costs of, and tradeoffs between, large-scale power sources such as coal plants and small-scale power sources close to customers. Finally, he looks at how utilities can respond to all of these challenges and remain viable, while financing hundreds of billions of dollars of investment without much of an increase in sales.

Upon publication, Smart Power was praised as an instant classic on the future of energy utilities. This Anniversary Edition includes up-to-date assessments of the industry by such leading energy experts as Daniel Estes and Jim Rogers, as well as a new afterword from the author. Anyone who is interested in our energy future will appreciate the clear explanations and the in-depth analysis it offers.
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Smart Power
Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities
Peter Fox-Penner
Island Press, 2010
A new national policy on climate change is under debate in the United States and is likely to result in a cap on greenhouse gas emissions for utilities. This and other developments will prompt utilities to undergo the largest changes in their history. Smart Power examines the many facets of this unprecedented transformation.
This enlightening book begins with a look back on the deregulatory efforts of the 1990s and their gradual replacement by concerns over climate change, promoting new technologies, and developing stable prices and supplies. In thorough but non-technical terms it explains the revolutionary changes that the Smart Grid is bringing to utility operations. It also examines the options for low-carbon emissions along with the real-world challenges the industry and its regulators must face as the industry retools and finances its new sources and systems.
Throughout the book, Peter Fox-Penner provides insights into the policy choices and regulatory reform needed to face these challenges. He not only weighs the costs and benefits of every option, but presents interviews with informed experts, including economists, utility CEOs, and engineers. He gives a brief history of the development of the current utility business model and examines possible new business models that are focused on energy efficiency.
Smart Power explains every aspect of the coming energy revolution for utilities in lively prose that will captivate even the most techno-phobic readers.
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Social Experimentation
Edited by Jerry A. Hausman and David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Since 1970 the United States government has spent over half a billion dollars on social experiments intended to assess the effect of potential tax policies, health insurance plans, housing subsidies, and other programs. Was it worth it? Was anything learned from these experiments that could not have been learned by other, and cheaper, means? Could the experiments have been better designed or analyzed? These are some of the questions addressed by the contributors to this volume, the result of a conference on social experimentation sponsored in 1981 by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The first section of the book looks at four types of experiments and what each accomplished. Frank P. Stafford examines the negative income tax experiments, Dennis J. Aigner considers the experiments with electricity pricing based on time of use, Harvey S. Rosen evaluates housing allowance experiments, and Jeffrey E. Harris reports on health experiments. In the second section, addressing experimental design and analysis, Jerry A. Hausman and David A. Wise highlight the absence of random selection of participants in social experiments, Frederick Mosteller and Milton C. Weinstein look specifically at the design of medical experiments, and Ernst W. Stromsdorfer examines the effects of experiments on policy. Each chapter is followed by the commentary of one or more distinguished economists.
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Ties That Bind
Charles Jacobson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001

In the early days of utility development, municipalities sought to shape the new systems in a variety of ways even as private firms struggled to retain control and fend off competition. In scope and consequence, some of the battles dwarfed the contemporary one between local jurisdictions and cable companies over broadband access to the Internet.  

In this comparative historical study, Jacobson draws upon economic theory to shed light on relationships between technology, market forces, and problems of governance that have arisen in connection with different utility networks over the past two hundred years. He focuses on water, electric, and cable television utility networks and on experiences in four major American cities—Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, arguing that information and transactions costs have played decisive roles in determining how different ownership and regulatory arrangements have functioned in different situations.

Using primary sources and bold conceptualizations, Jacobson begins his study by examining the creation of centralized water systems in the first half of the nineteenth century, moves to the building of electric utilities from the 1880s to the 1980s, and concludes with an analysis of cable television franchising from the 1960s to the 1980s. Ties That Bind addresses highly practical questions of how to make ownership, regulatory, and contracting arrangements work better and also explores broader concerns about private monopoly and the role of government in society.

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Tva's Public Planning
The Vision, The Reality
Walter L. Creese
University of Tennessee Press, 1990

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When They Hid the Fire
A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America
Daniel French
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
When They Hid the Fire examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology that were adopted between the mid-nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, Daniel French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society. As technological advancements allowed for an increasing physical distance between power generation and power consumption, the commodity of electricity became consciously detached from the environmentally destructive fire and coal that produced it. This development, along with cultural forces, led the public to define electricity as mysterious, utopian, and an alternative to nearby fire-based energy sources. With its adoption occurring simultaneously with Progressivism and consumerism, electricity use was encouraged and seen as an integral part of improvement and modernity, leading Americans to culturally construct electricity as unlimited and environmentally inconsequential—a newfound “basic right” of life in the United States.
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