Operation
Electricity use can vary dramatically on short and medium time frames, and the pricing system may not reflect the instantaneous cost as additional higher-cost ("peaking") sources are brought on-line. In addition, the capacity or willingness of electricity consumers to adjust to prices by altering demand (elasticity of demand) may be low, particularly over short time frames. In many markets, consumers (particularly retail customers) do not face real-time pricing at all, but pay rates based on average annual costs or other constructed prices.
Various market failures rule out an ideal result. One is that suppliers' costs do not include all damages and risks of their activities. External costs are incurred by others directly or by damage to the environment, and are known as externalities. Theoretically the best approach would be to add external costs to the direct costs of the supplier as a tax (internalisation of external costs). Another possibility (referred to as the second-best approach in the theory of taxation) is to intervene on the demand side by some kind of rebate.
Energy demand management activities should bring the demand and supply closer to a perceived optimum.
Governments of many countries mandated performance of various programs for demand management after the 1973 energy crisis. An early example is the National Energy Conservation Policy Act of 1978 in the U.S., preceded by similar actions in California and Wisconsin in 1975.
Read more about this topic: Energy Demand Management
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)