مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد مدیریت استراتژیک خدمات الکتریکی مسکونی در بازار رقابتی – Sage 2017

This paper aims to empirically investigate consumers’ preference structures and their willingness to pay for key features of future residential electric power services that they have not experienced in the regulated market. Using a choice experiment based on conjoint survey and applying a mixed logit model, we quantitatively estimate individual utility functions for certain important attributes such as type of service-providing company, installation of smart meter devices, introduction of E-prosumer groups, relaxation of progressive electricity billing system, and share of renewable energy in the generation mix. The analysis reveals that households prefer installation of smart meter devices and introduction of E-prosumer groups, and are willing to pay 10,044 KRW/year (USD 8.97/year) and 5,222 KRW/year (USD 4.66/year), respectively, for these services. However, households dislike the participation of privately-owned companies under the competitive market structure, owing to the possibility of a rise in the electricity price.

Introduction

Due to the technological advance of microgeneration, changes in consumers’ attitudes toward the generation mix, and governments’ efforts to stimulate meaningful competition in the electric power generation sector, the electric power industry has been gradually experiencing reforms of its structure for the past few decades. Previously, the electric power industry was considered a typical example of utility industries, where the government or its agencies managed all functions from maintaining secure and economic operations of the power transmission network to managing the distribution network to provide household end-users with electric power services. However, privatization in the electric power industry has become a global trend since the late 1990s, which has led to government agencies losing their monopolistic power in the market.1 Basically, regulation and centralization were the keywords to describe the electricity sector in the past, while liberalization and deregulation are the keywords in the present scenario. In this context, evolution stages of electric power industry can be summarized as in Table 1. The categorization in Table 1 is based on the 10- year implementation plan established in 1999 for restructuring of Korea electric power industry (Park, 2001).2 In the 1st stage (monopoly), Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) was a vertically integrated public company with generation, transmission, system operation, distribution and retail department. After 2001, in the 2nd stage (generation competition), KEPCO’s generation part was divided into five fossil-fuel generation companies and one nuclear generation company and Korea Power Exchange (KPX) was established for an independent system and market operation. Generation companies are still subsidiaries of KEPCO until now and incompletely compete with each other as independent power plants in cost-based pool of KPX. According to the authority’s plan, the 3rd stage is for introducing wholesale competition on the demand-side of the wholesale electricity market with multiple bundled distribution and retail companies, and the 4th stage is intended for implementing free-choice for end-users through the unbundling of distribution and retail companies. However, the 3rd and 4th restructuring stage was not implemented in Korea because of several political conflicts. For this reason, Korea electric power industry still remains in the generation competition stage. In 2016, unbundling of retail sector became a hot issue in Korea to promote privately led energy businesses such as demand response aggregator, electric vehicle charging service provider, and private retail business bundled with telecommunication business. However, this agenda died down with the impeachment of the former President Park. Meanwhile, electric power industries of Western countries are mostly in retail competition stage. Some jurisdictions in United States and Japan are also in the 4th stage.