Sub-Saharan Africa

Workshop on Power Market Reforms and Global Climate Change

This meeting will focus on the intersection of two crucial challenges for the organization of energy infrastructures in the developing world. First, for nearly two decades most major developing countries have struggled to introduce market forces in their electric power systems. In every case, that effort has proceeded more slowly than reformers originally hoped; the outcomes have been hybrids that are far from the efficiency and organization of the "ideal" textbook model for a market-based power system. Second, growing concern about global climate change has put the spotlight on the need to build an international regulatory regime that includes strong incentives for key developing countries to control their emissions of greenhouse gases. In most of those countries, the power sector is the largest single source of emissions. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol included mechanisms that would reward developing nations that cut emissions, but so far those systems have functioned far short of their imagined potential. A growing chorus of analysts and policy makers are expressing dissatisfaction with those existing mechanisms and clamoring for alternatives.

This meeting will offer diagnoses of what has gone wrong and what opportunities have nonetheless emerged. It will focus on practical solutions and look at the prospects for different technologies to meet growing demand for power while minimizing the ecological footprint of power generation. It will engage scholars who are studying the industrial organization of the electric power sector (and other infrastructures) in developing countries as well as those who study the effectiveness of international legal regimes. It will engage practitioners, including regulators and energy policy makers. Our aims are not only to focus on new theories that are emerging to explain the organization of the power sector and the design of meaningful international institutions, but also to identify practical implications for investors, regulators, and policy makers.

Presentations will include recent results from the research of Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. We will present the main findings from a comprehensive study of power market reform in five developing countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa). We will also show the results from a detailed analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions from two key states in India and three provinces in China--a study conducted jointly with the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. In addition, we will present new conclusions from ongoing work that focuses on strategies for engaging developing countries in the global climate regime. Among the topics considered will be the prospects for accelerating the introduction of natural gas into electric power systems--especially those in China and India where the present domination of coal leads to relatively high emissions.

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Elisabeth Paté-Cornell

Read more about Elisabeth Paté-Cornell

475 Via Ortega Room 336
Huang Engineering Building
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-3823

mep@stanford.edu

Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor of Engineering

Professor of Management Science and Engineering

CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member

Chair (Emerita) of Management Science and Engineering

FSI Senior Fellow by courtesy

mep.png PhD

Dr. M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell was born in Dakar, Senegal. Her academic degrees are in mathematics and physics (BS, Marseilles, France, 1968), applied mathematics and computer science (MS and Engineer Degree, Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, 1970; 1971), operations research (MS, Stanford, 1972), and engineering-economic systems (Stanford, PhD, 1978). She was an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at MIT (1978 to 1981). In 1981, she joined the Stanford Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, where she became Professor (1991), then Chair (1997). In 1999, she was named the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering. She oversaw from 1999, the merger of two Stanford departments to form a new department of Management Science and Engineering, which she chaired from January 2000 to June 2011. She is a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She joined CISAC as an affiliated faculty member in September 2011.

She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995, to its Council (2001-2007), and to the French Académie des Technologies (2003). She was a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (2001-2004; 2006-2008). Her current memberships include the Boards of Trustees of the Aerospace Corp. (2004-), of InQtel (2006-) and of Draper Corporation (2009-). She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Naval Postgraduate School, which she chaired from 2004 to 2006.

She is a world leader in engineering risk analysis and management and more generally, the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. Her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group at Stanford have focused on the inclusion of technical and management factors in probabilistic risk analysis models with applications to the NASA shuttle tiles, offshore oil platforms and medical systems. Since 2001, she has combined risk analysis and game analysis to assess intelligence information and risks of terrorist attacks.

She is past president (1995)/fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, and fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. She has been a consultant to many industrial firms and government organizations. She has authored or co-authored more than a hundred papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. She has received several best-paper awards from professional organizations and peer-reviewed journals.

See profile here.

Escaping the Resource Curse? A Look at Nigeria

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 | 12:00 PM -Wednesday, February 23, 2005 | 1:30 PM

Professor Tom Heller of Stanford University Law School and CDDRL's Program on Rule of Law will speak on his current research.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Thomas C. Heller

Crown Quad rm 329
Stanford, California 94305-8610

(650) 723-7650 (650) 725-0253

theller@stanford.edu

Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies, Emeritus

THeller.jpg LLB

An expert in international law and legal institutions, Thomas C. Heller has focused his research on the rule of law, international climate control, global energy use, and the interaction of government and nongovernmental organizations in establishing legal structures in the developing world. He has created innovative courses on the role of law in transitional and developing economies, as well as the comparative study of law in developed economies. He co-directs the law school’s Rule of Law Program, as well as the Stanford Program in International Law. Professor Heller has been a visiting professor at the European University Institute, Catholic University of Louvain, and Hong Kong University, and has served as the deputy director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where he is now a senior fellow.

Professor Heller is also a senior fellow (by courtesy) at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1979, he was a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and an attorney-advisor to the governments of Chile and Colombia.

FSI Senior Fellow and Woods Institute Senior Fellow by courtesy

Thomas C. Heller Professor Stanford Law School and CDDRL

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An alternative nuclear posture

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Wed, 12/08/2004 - 12:00

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President Bush's 2002 nuclear posture differs sharply from its predecessors and is relevant to the President's recently repeated assertion that he will strike first against any country that might pose a threat of using weapons of mass destruction.

The main new trend in the posture is that the US will be prepared to use nuclear weapons in a much wider range of circumstances than before. Such an emphasis has not been seen since the days of "flexible response" forty or so years ago, when tactical nuclear weapons were deployed in Europe and elsewhere.

Yet, nuclear weapons don't help much with the kinds of missions the US prepares for, including the ones noted in the posture, such as digging out deep underground facilities that might contain bio-warfare agents. Deep underground facilities are difficult or impossible to destroy without large nuclear explosions that create large amounts of fallout. Nuclear weapons are more suited for use against shallow-buried facilities (of the order of ten meters deep) but even in those cases, Hiroshima-type yields are needed, and complete destruction of the bio-agents cannot be guaranteed. Other uses mentioned to justify the posture are even more marginal in their feasibility.

Given the overwhelming US conventional advantage and the relative invulnerability of the US to all but nuclear weapons, the US nuclear posture should aim at minimizing the chances of nuclear weapons spread rather than seeking marginal gains with tactical nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are equalizers. Why bring them back into the forefront of regional problems, whether in the Middle East or anywhere else?

Increasing the US nuclear threat will increase the motivation of adversaries, big or small, to improve and extend their own nuclear force, or to get one if they don't already have one. The US cannot subsequently be confident that it will be the only power to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. There are now several demonstrations of the relative ease with which states can acquire nuclear weapons. North Korea, a poor nation of 17 million people, made and separated with little help enough plutonium for perhaps one or more weapons. South Africa made at least six weapons with essentially no help. Other cases tell the same tale.

The nuclear genie is long out of the bottle and the relative stability that characterized the Cold War is also gone. Instead, the US has been pursuing an aggressive strategy of military expansion around the world and ever closer to other states' vital interests. Quite apart from the wisdom of that strategy, is it wise to couple it with an increased nuclear threat to possible adversaries, as the posture does?

In the past, the existence of a real or putative nuclear threat has been a serious motivation for states to improve and extend their own nuclear force, or to get one if they didn't already have it. That was true of the US, USSR, China, and others. The US, as the world's strongest and least vulnerable major power, should pursue a strategy that minimizes the most serious risk rather than increase it for marginal, and questionable, benefits. The posture implies a strategy that does the opposite.

A nuclear posture better suited to our times would recognize these changes. It would lay the policy basis for the following difficult, long-term, but necessary steps:

1. Minimizing the demand for nuclear weapons, focusing on Asia. Asia contains most of the world's population and might, in a few decades, have most of its wealth. Three states there (four if Israel is included) have nuclear weapons; several more could readily have them. The US nuclear posture should provide US initiatives toward a more stable security order there, one in which peaceful states will not be threatened by nuclear or potentially nuclear rivals. The Non-Proliferation Treaty provides a basis -the only existing basis- for such an order, but it needs to be updated with more inducements in the way of technical cooperation and reassurance, and more clearly defined internationally agreed sanctions if the treaty is disregarded. The US nuclear posture in essence forswears the lead in this endeavor.

2. A pattern for nuclear arms reductions that would include eventually limitations on all arsenals. Openness here is as important as numbers. The US and Russia have most of the weapons but, after the first hundred or so survivable weapons, it matters less and less how many a state has. An internationally recognized framework is needed that can be applied to the regions of the world where nuclear rivalries threaten. Instead, the US has gone the other way, with a sketchy US-Russia agreement that delays the time scale for reductions and does not provide any precedent for international agreements on inspections.

3. A strategy for addressing the problem of nuclear terrorism. The most serious dimension of that problem--the possibility of a terrorist nuclear weapon --is closely related to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and capabilities. Any strategy to avoid that has an important international dimension. Hundreds of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, most of it surplus in the US and former Soviet Union from the Cold War, need to be better secured and accounted for. A solution to the problem of keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of the tens of millions of shipping containers that crisscross the world requires international cooperation on standards, procedures, cost sharing, and inspections. A good start has been made toward these goals, mainly through the Nunn-Lugar programs, but more money and agreements are needed. A modern nuclear posture should establish the policy basis for securing those resources and agreements. There is at present no comprehensive global strategy for securing such vital agreements and establishing the institutions to enforce them. Consistent, high-priority US participation is vital to secure other countries' participation.

4. A strategy for reducing the risks of accidental nuclear launch while at the same time maintaining invulnerability of the reduced deployments. The nuclear posture briefly mentions the "rigorous safeguards" on US weapons systems and proposes to deal with the problem of accidental or unauthorized launch of "certain foreign forces" via nuclear missile defense. That is at best a partial and certainly a distant remedy. Maintaining the human and financial infrastructure for nuclear weapons system will become more difficult in the US as well as elsewhere. Given the relationship among nuclear deterrent forces, the problem cannot be solved unilaterally. A program that would use US technical leadership to improve warning and control for all states threatened by nuclear weapons is also needed. It is needed now in South Asia. Later, it could help limit crises with or among Russia and China, and help prevent proliferation in the Middle East. President Reagan, with a portion of Star Wars, and, before him, President Eisenhower, with Open Skies, had something of the kind in mind. It is time to begin thinking about how this would look in modern form.

In summary, a nuclear posture for a world with more dispersed power centers and more widely available nuclear technology should have more, not less, emphasis on international agreements. President Eisenhower stated fifty years ago that "Only chaos will result from our abandonment of collective international security." That is even truer in today's world than it was then. The present administration seems to have a bias against such agreements, which are slow to bear fruit and do not win votes. That is shown in the posture itself, which states that arms control measures will not stand in the way of nuclear weapons development.

Yet these and other agreements are essential to deal with the dangers of proliferation to unstable states, with the possible use of international trade for terrorism, and with the risk of accidents and unauthorized launch. Nuclear deterrence continues to be needed, but the last thing a modern posture should do is to bring nuclear weapons back into the forefront of regional deterrence.

Ironically, when it has committed itself to the task, the US has used international agreements more effectively than any other nation. The Cold War-- better called a Cold Peace perhaps, since the military lines of demarcation never changed while the safeguarding of Western values and collapse of the Soviet Union were brought about mainly by economic and political instruments-- saw a rise in US power and influence in good part through the use of US-led international agreements in the areas of trade and security, areas that are necessarily related. Now is not the time to give up that approach, especially not in matters relating to nuclear weapons.

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Post Conflict Reconstruction Strategies: The NGO Perspective

Wednesday, February 2, 2005 | 12:00 PM -Wednesday, February 2, 2005 | 1:30 PM

Liz McBride, Director of the Post-Conflict Development Initiative at the London-based Internatinal Rescue Committee will discuss state reconstruction challenges following violent conflict in the developing world. McBride is a visiting researcher in the spring quarter at CDDRL. She has worked in humanitarian relief and post-conflict reconstruction in Tanzania and Rwanda. McBride's responsibilities at the International Rescue Committee include creating and ensuring implementation of new institutional program frameworks in response to the changing nature of humanitarian aid; overseeing technical areas of community driven reconstruction, good governance, civil society, local capacity development, conflict resolution and economic development; and supporting service delivery technical units in defining post-conflict strategies and priorities (i.e. health, education). She also works intensively with the International Rescue Committee's primary target post-conflict countries: Sudan and South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Liberia.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Liz McBride Director, Post-Conflict Development Initiative International Rescue Committee

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Three CISAC honors students win prestigious scholarships

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Thu, 12/02/2004 - 12:00

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Three of CISAC's undergraduate honors students are among Stanford's handful of winners of prestigious scholarships for 2005-2006. Senior Sheena Chestnut and 2002 graduate Tarun Chhabra, both Phi Beta Kappa members, are among five Stanford students selected for 2005 Marshall Scholarships. Alex Greninger, a 2003 graduate of CISAC's honors program, is one of two Stanford graduates named as George J. Mitchell Scholars.

Marshall Scholarships go to about 40 scholars each year, in recognition of academic excellence, leadership, and commitment to public service. The awards cover all costs for students to attend the British university of their choice for two to three years.

A total of 12 Mitchell Scholars selected nationwide will receive tuition, housing, and a stipend to pursue post-graduate studies at universities in Ireland or Northern Ireland.

Chhabra served in 2003-2004 on the research staff for the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, a group convened by the U.N. secretary-general to study global threats and recommend collective security measures, including potential changes to the U.N. A double-major in Slavic languages and literatures and international relations, Chhabra wrote his honors thesis at CISAC on "The Generals' Intervention: U.S. Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia, 1992-1993." He plans to study international relations at Oxford University next year.

Greninger graduated Stanford in 2004 with co-terminal bachelor's and master's degrees in biological sciences and a bachelor's degree in international relations. His CISAC honors thesis, "Beyond the Last Move--Developing Biodefenses against Engineered Anthrax and Smallpox," for which he won the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, is one of three honors theses he wrote at Stanford. His undergraduate research served as the basis for "Biotechnology and Bioterrorism: An Unprecedented World," which he co-wrote with CISAC Co-Director Christopher Chyba and published in Survival. Greninger is now at Cambridge University on a Churchill Scholarship.

Chestnut, a political science major and creative writing minor, is researching nuclear smuggling in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) for her honors thesis. After studying at Oxford during her junior year and interning at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, she is interested in using her Marshall scholarship to study international relations at Oxford.

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State Building in Africa

Wednesday, December 1, 2004 | 12:00 PM -Wednesday, December 1, 2004 | 1:15 PM

Gayle Smith is a renowned expert on African politics and economics. She has worked on failed states, post-conflict management, and transnational threats in Africa for over 20 years. She served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council under the Clinton Administration. Smith negotiated a ceasefire between Uganda and Rwanda in 1999 and won the National Security Council's Samuel Nelson Drew Award for Distinguished Contribution in Pursuit of Global Peace for her role in the negotiated peace agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia. She has travelled extensively in active war zones and published pioneering analyses of political emergencies and humanitarian interventions in Africa in particular.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Gayle Smith Center for American Progress

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Electricity reform in South Africa is at a critical juncture, says Anton Eberhard

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Tue, 08/31/2004 - 12:00

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Anton Eberhard writes that South Africa will experience routine electricity blackouts in a few years unless new electricity policy and investment decisions are formulated and implemented this year.

South Africa will experience routine electricity blackouts in a few years unless new electricity policy and investment decisions are formulated and implemented this year.

This is the inexorable conclusion that emerges from scenario and modelling exercises undertaken separately by the National Electricity Regulator, Eskom and large energy-intensive industries.

Growing electricity demand will outstrip existing national supply capacity next year or the year thereafter, assuming a prudent reserve margin to allow for maintenance and unscheduled plant shutdowns.

Hydro-electricity imports, mainly Cahora Bassa in Mozambique, will provide respite for about another year. Thereafter, we need further generation capacity or significant energy savings and demand-side measures.

Eskom has started re-commissioning old moth-balled coal-fired power stations to meet this challenge. Camden, the first plant, will be relatively easy to re-commission and work has commenced. Grootvlei will be more difficult and Komati, the last plant that Eskom plans to re-commission, will be the most uncertain and expensive.

If successful, these old generating stations will give us a breather until around 2008. And then we need new generation capacity.

2008 might seem years away, but investment decisions, environmental impact assessments, plant construction and commissioning take many years. For a hydro-electric or pumped storage scheme, this could take ten years. A coal-fired power station could take six years or more, and gas turbines - two to four years.

If our economy grows faster, or we are not able to implement effective demand-side measures, new power generation capacity might be needed even earlier.

Government is aware of this situation. The President confirmed, in his state of the nation address in parliament in May, that a tender for new capacity will be awarded early in 2005.

The Department of Minerals and Energy has appointed technical advisors to prepare and manage this tender. However, their work schedule indicates that the contract with a new Independent Power Producer will only be concluded early in 2006, and this will only happen if the bid manages to comply with National Treasury's Public Private Partnership regulations. The DME will have to show that Eskom cannot build a new plant more cheaply - an interesting possibility given Eskom's competitive cost of capital and the potential for transfer-pricing with its current portfolio of extremely low-cost generating plant.

Given these tight time constraints, it is not unlikely that we shall have to resort to buying, on an emergency basis, a series of highly expensive, paraffin-burning open-cycle gas turbines.

There is a dangerous assumption that the current tender process for new generation capacity answers concerns about supply security. It does not.

The challenge is not only to manage the current tender process within tight time-constraints. We need to make decisions this year about procuring much more capacity than the approximately 1000 MW anticipated in the current tender.

A likely planning scenario indicates that this year, 2004, we need to make investment decisions on a new pumped-storage scheme, a new pulverised coal-fired plant and a green-field coal fluidized-bed combustor or a combined-cycle gas turbine. In short, we need to start placing orders for a range of new power plant. In ensuing years we shall need to continue to order new plant.

These challenges raise the question of whether a part-time committee of government officials, assisted by consultants, is the most appropriate and sustainable mechanism to continue to procure new power? It also provokes debate about what market structure is appropriate to encourage the most efficient and cost-effective investment decisions?

Following the 1998 While Paper on Energy Policy, and a number of subsequent studies, Cabinet decided, in May 2001, to restructure the power sector by unbundling Eskom's electricity transmission division into an independent company and selling-off 30% of Eskom's generation plants. New capacity would be provided by private investors and an electricity trading market would be established comprising a power exchange and a parallel market for bilateral power contracts and financial hedges. None of this happened.

What is emerging is a quite different market model. In her budget speech, the Minister of Minerals and Energy stated that "the state has to put security of supply above all and above competition especially". The Minister of Public Enterprises has indicated that Eskom will not be privatised and that a strong state-owned utility is important for social and economic development.

Eskom is thus likely to continue to dominate the market. It may even be permitted to build new generation plant. Private sector investment will be permitted only on the margins in the form of Independent Power Producers. They will sign long-term power purchase agreements with Eskom (or with an independent transmission company or system operator, if these are eventually separated form Eskom).

Government will now need to clarify whether the emerging market model for the electricity sector is its preferred model or is merely a temporary measure to secure emergency supplied. This is not a trivial question - for it strikes at the heart of the cost and efficiency issues in the power sector, and will have long-term consequences for electricity prices in this country.

Few remember the controversial electricity price-hikes by Eskom in the late 1970s and 1980s when it made investment mistakes that resulted in huge unused power generation capacity. History demonstrates the potential weaknesses of the old industry model where state-owned monopoly utilities simply pass the costs of poor investment decisions to consumers.

The current tender process is also full of risk. A small number of officials and technical advisors will decide how much new power is needed, using which fuel sources, when and where. While a degree of (once-off) competition might be possible through the tender bids, long-term power purchase agreements could tie-up non-competitive electricity prices for decades.

Plans for a new market structure, where investors have to compete to sell their power in a power exchange or a contract market, have been sacrificed in the face of security of supply concerns.

Periods of supply uncertainty and shortages are never a good time to design and implement new competitive market structures. The long period of large capacity surpluses that provided a window of opportunity for major reform has disappeared. Now we have to patch the current system and prepare for the future.

The default IPP/ single-buyer model that is emerging now requires the establishment of a robust and sustainable institutional structure (probably best attached to the power system operator) that will be responsible for long term planning, security of supply and procurement of generation capacity.

We can avoid future black-outs. But we need to act now.

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August 2004 Workshop on Energy Transitions

This conference was convened by the Energy Research Centre (ERC) at the University of Cape Town and the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University. Held at the University of Cape Town, it took stock of what is known about the impact of modern energy services on the poor. The workshop focused mainly on the South African experience, but within the context of several other studies taking shape in countries such as China and India. It brought together invited experts from academia, government and industry to share research findings and potential future research direction was mapped.

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August 2004 Workshop on Energy Transitions

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