La demanda de energía puede disminuir considerablemente en la noche como la temperatura baja..

...

Es posible que haya encontrado la noción de un equilibrio en los mercados competitivos antes en un curso introductorio en economía. En el Capítulo 2, proporcionaremos un

El tratamiento de los mercados, la oferta y la demanda. Pero por ahora vamos a revisar brevemente cómo el análisis de la oferta y la demanda pueden ilustrar el concepto de equilibrio en un mercado.

Considere el mercado mundial de granos de café. Supongamos que la demanda y la oferta

Las curvas para los granos de café son como se muestra en la Figura 1.2. La curva de demanda nos indica

HREE KEY ANALYTICAL TOOLS

The energy demand can decrease considerably at night as the low temperature.

• Some plants in the company are relatively expensive to operate. For example, it is more expensive to produce electricity by burning oil than by burning natural gas. Plants that use nuclear fuel are even less expensive to run. If the company wants to produce energy at the lowest possible cost, its objective should take these cost differences into account.

• If the company expects demand for electricity to be low for a long period of time, to close production at some of its plants.

But there are substantial costs to start and close plants. Therefore, if the company expects

Demand for electricity is low for only a short time (for example, a few hours), you may not want to close a plant that will be needed again when demand rises.

The company must also take into account the energy transmission costs of generators

To his clients.

• There is a spot market for electricity during every hour of the day. A company can buy or sell energy from other electric power companies. If the company can buy electricity enough, it may be able to reduce the electricity service costs of other producers, instead of generating all the electricity itself. If you can sell electricity at a sufficiently high price, the company may find it profitable to generate more electricity than customers need. You can then sell extra electricity to other power companies, electric power companies usually make decisions on an hourly basis - that is 8,760 (365 days and 24 hours a day) production decisions of one year.

MARGINAL REASONING AND RESTRICTED OPTIMIZATION

Restrictive analysis of optimization may reveal that the "obvious"

The questions are not always correct. Let's illustrate this point by showing how constrained optimization problems can be solved using marginal reasoning. Imagine that you are the product manager of a small brewery that produces a high quality microbrew beer. Budget for next year, and assign it between local television and Radio Spots. Although radio spots are cheaper, television spots reach an audience. Television spots are also more persuasive and therefore on average stimulate

ANALYZING ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

New beer sales derived from amounts spent on TV and radio advertising

In light of the information in Table 1.1, how would you allocate your budget advertising if your goal is to maximize new beer sales?

This is a restricted optimization problem. You want to allocate spending on television and radio so that you maximize one goal (new beer sales) that the total amount spent on TV and radio should not exceed the amount

Advertising budget of $ 1 million. Using a notation similar to that introduced in the Section, if B (T, R) represents the amount of new beer sales when it spends T dollars on television advertising and R $ on radio advertising, its restricted the optimization problem.

MARGINAL REASONING AND RESTRICTED OPTIMIZATION

ANALYSIS OF BALANCE

A second important tool in microeconomics is the analysis of equilibrium, a concept found in many branches of science. An equilibrium in a system is a state or condition that will continue indefinitely while the exogenous factors remain, provided no external factors alter the equilibrium. To illustrate a balance, imagine a physical system consisting of a ball in a cup, as shown in Figure 1.1.

Here the force of gravity pulls the ball down towards the bottom of the cup. A ball initially held at point A will not remain at point A when the ball is released. Rather, it will swing back and forth until it seats at point B. Thus, the system is not in equilibrium when the ball is thrown at A because the ball will not remain there. It could be in equilibrium if the ball was released at B. The system will remain in equilibrium when the ball is at B until some exogenous factor changes; For example, if someone had to tilt the cup, the ball would move from B to another point.

You may have found the notion of an equilibrium in competitive markets before in an introductory course in economics. In Chapter 2, we will provide a

The treatment of markets, supply and demand. But for now we will briefly review how the analysis of supply and demand can illustrate the concept of