Within the IEB framework, the Chair of Energy Sustainability promotes research into the production, supply and use of the energy needed to maintain social welfare and development, placing special emphasis on economic, environmental and social aspects. There are three main research areas of interest within the program: energy sustainability, competition and consumers, and energy firms. The energy sustainability research area covers topics as energy efficiency, CO2 capture and storage, R+D in energy, green certificate markets, smart grids and meters, green energy and biofuels. The competition and consumers area is oriented to research on wholesale markets, retail markets, regulation, competition and consumers. The research area on energy firms is devoted to the analysis of business strategies, social and corporative responsibility, and industrial organization. Disseminating research outputs to a broad audience is an important objective of the program, whose results must be relevant both at national and international level.The Chair of Energy Sustainability of the University of Barcelona-IEB is funded by the following enterprises ACS, CEPSA, CLH, Enagas, Endesa, FCC Energia, HC Energia, Gas Natural Fenosa, and Repsol) through FUNSEAM (Foundation for Energy and Environmental Sustainability). The IEB working papers represent ongoing research that is circulated to encourage discussion and has not undergone a peer review process. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IEB.
Documents de Treball de l'IEB 2016/4 THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF ELECTRICITY LOSSESMaria Teresa Costa-Campi, Daniel Daví-Arderius, Elisa Trujillo-Baute ABSTRACT: Although electricity losses constitute an important, but inevitable, amount of wasted resources (and a share that has to be funded), they remain one of the lesser known parts of an electricity system, and this despite the fact that the decisions of generators, transmission and distribution system operators and consumers all impact on them. In this paper we analyse the effects of such losses from two perspectives: from that of consumption or outflows and from that of generation or inflows. Given that end-user consumption varies across the day, consumption has direct implications for electricity losses. Indeed, demand-side management policies seek to encourage consumers to use less energy during peak hours and to reduce network congestion. At the same time, from the perspective of generation, the recent growth in distributed generation has modified the traditional, unidirectional, downward flows in electricity systems. This affects losses as energy is produced in the lower voltage network, which is closer to points of consumption. In this paper we evaluate the impact of consumption patterns and different generation technologies on energy losses. To do so, we draw on data from a real electricity system with a high level of renewable penetration, namely, that of Spain between 2011 and 2013. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to analyse the real impa...