In 2002 the Council of the Great City Schools and its members set out to develop performance measures that could be used to improve business operations in urban public school districts. The Council launched the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to achieve these objectives. The purposes of the project were to: (1) Establish a common…

Climate change is only one factor driving growing numbers of cities throughout the globe to reconsider conventional approaches to electricity generation and use. In the U.S., this momentum is incorporating a shift away from centralized, supply-side approaches reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear power, toward more distributed, flexible, and cleaner…

Even as the conventional energy system is fundamentally challenged by the "energy-environment crisis," its adherents have presented the prospect of "abundant" and purportedly "green" nuclear power as part of a strategy to address the crisis. Surveying the development of nuclear power in India, this article finds that…

Although many authors have drawn on the basic insights of the early founders of the economic theory of regulation, the ability to cogently present the general form of the theory in a readily accessible graphical format has only recently emerged. Although providing a promising approach for illustrating and analyzing regulatory and deregulatory…

Climate change, rising energy costs, and other dilemmas raise the prospect for major change in energy-ecology-society relations. Two prominent proposals for change include: a nuclear power renaissance; and mega-scale renewable energy development. Both suggest that modern society will receive a rising stream of less CO2-rich kilowatt-hours, so that…

In the field of electricity markets, the development of training tools for engineers has been extremely useful. A novel experimental economics approach based on a computational Web platform of an electricity market is proposed here for the practical teaching of electrical engineering students. The approach is designed to diminish the gap that…

Since the mid-1980s, power sector liberalization has been embraced at different levels in the East Asian countries of China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The dominant rationale underlying power liberalization has been a quest for efficiency improvements, to be achieved by substituting private market activity for public regulations and by opening…

This research presents an examination of student satisfaction related to online training for adult learners in the nuclear power industry. Both groups, the nuclear industry and its associated workforce, have demonstrable needs which might be met by such programs. The nuclear industry itself faces an expansion of facilities and services combined…

APPA's Effective & Innovative Practices Award continues to highlight an ever-growing list of creative and practical programs and processes that enhance and transform service delivery, lower costs, increase productivity, improve customer service, generate revenue, or otherwise benefit an educational institution. The five 2009 award-winning…

This account describes action learning in a small to medium-size enterprise (SME) that operates as a local power utility on an established market that is currently going through a process of radical transformation. The task of the action learning set was to improve the flow of information to employees about the evolving framework in which the…

Project-based learning (PBL), a learning environment in which projects drive learning, has been successfully used in various courses in the educational programs of different disciplines. However, concerns have been raised as to the breadth of the content covered and, in particular, whether PBL can be applied to specialized subjects without…

The nation's colleges are feeling the pinch of the economic downturn, and maintenance and operations (M&O) budgets especially are under pressure. This article presents data from the 38th annual Maintenance & Operations Cost Study for colleges that can help one in benchmarking expenditures at one's institution. Data provided only targets two-year…

Most previous cap and trade programs have distributed emission allowances for free to incumbent producers. However, in the electricity sector the value of CO[subscript 2] allowances may be far in excess of costs to industry and giving them away to firms diverts allowance value from other purposes. Using a detailed simulation model, this paper…

My dissertation research concentrates on the causes, motivations, and results of electricity restructuring, and research on the effectiveness of economic teaching and retention. The first chapter looks at motivations for electricity restructuring in the United States in terms of the Interest Group and Public Interest setting. The second chapter…

Despite the worst economic environment in generations, spending by K-12 institutions on maintenance and operations (M&O) held its own--defying historical trends that have shown M&O spending among the most affected in times of budget tightening. This article presents data from the 38th annual Maintenance & Operations Cost Study for…