Sharif Digital Repository

Significant energy subsidies are believed to be the main factor that has resulted in high energy intensities of Iranian industries. The Subsidy Reform Act of 2010 was directed at modifying energy consumption pattern and fostering energy efficiency enhancement. This study aims at analyzing the effect of energy subsidy reform on promoting energy efficiency in six energy intensive industries of Iran. In order to do so, the energy efficiency practices that have not been adopted after the implementation of the first phase of energy subsidy reform are investigated. Data analysis reveals that if financially interesting investments are determined as those with payback periods less than three years,... 

Sustainable economic growth and improvement of the social welfare depend upon the sufficient supply of energy resources, while the utilization of energy resources is one of the main factors of environmental degradation. This research is involved with development of a sustainable energy system model and a new method for sustainability assessment. This model represents the flow of energy from primary resources through processing, conversion, and end-use technologies in an optimization framework where the useful energy demand in various social and economic sectors is met. The impact of energy supply and consumption chain on the environment at each level of energy system is also embedded in the... 

Owners of electric vehicles (EVs) can offer the storage capacity of their batteries to the operator of a microgrid as a service called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) to hold the balance between supply and demand of electricity, particularly when the microgrid has intermittent renewable energy sources. Literature review implies that V2G has economic benefits for both microgrid operator and EV owners, but it is unclear how these benefits are divided between them. The challenge grows when the policy makers rely on the V2G revenue as an incentive for expanding the penetration of EVs in the automotive market. This paper models the interaction between microgrid operator and EV owners as a bargaining game... 

The price elasticity of gasoline demand is a key parameter in evaluation of various policies. However, most of the literature uses aggregate data to identify this elasticity. Temporal and spatial aggregation make such elasticity estimates biased. We employ a unique dataset of all gasoline transactions in Iran during a 4-month period around an unexpected exogenous price change to identify that price elasticity. We also identify a significant withholding behavior by consumers in response to anticipated price changes. The consumers reduce or postpone their purchases when they expect a decrease in prices. Controlling for date fixed effects would eliminate homogeneous withholding responses.... 

We estimate the price elasticity of the demand for gasoline smuggling in Iran. For this purpose, we employ a detailed panel of monthly gasoline consumption data from 160 distribution hubs during the period 2005–2014. We apply two different approaches which are diff-in-diff and panel data estimations. The results suggest that the foreign-to-home gasoline price ratios have a significant impact on the time-varying elasticity of demand. This finding supports the hypothesis that an increase in domestic gasoline prices will significantly reduce the demand for smuggling. In addition, as the distance of a region from its closest higher-price neighboring country diminishes, the price elasticity of... 

While the cost of the access network could be considerably reduced by the use of caching, this is not currently happening because content providers (CPs), who alone have the detailed demand data required for optimal content placement, have no natural incentive to use them to minimize access network operator (ANO) expenditure. We argue that ANOs should therefore provide such an incentive in the form of direct subsidies paid to the CPs in proportion to the realized savings. We apply coalition game theory to design the required subsidy framework and propose a distributed algorithm, based on Lagrangian decomposition, allowing ANOs and CPs to collectively realize the optimal memory for bandwidth... 

In recent years, subsidy payment has been made a main challenge for governments due to growth of population and energy price in global markets. Targeted subsidy plan has been implemented in Iran since last year, and this article discusses its effects on costs and revenues of Tehran Electricity Company as one of the major subdivisions of Iran's electricity industry. In the new system, structural changes have been made in electricity tariffs, so it is not possible to predict the future trends in electricity consumption only based on the past consumptions. In order to model the decision making structure in the recent conditions, a system dynamics method is applied. In addition to modeling the...