STOCHASTIC ENERGY DEMAND AND THE STABILIZATION VALUE OF ENERGY STORAGE

The economic value of energy storage to meet peak electricity demand is analyzed with an emphasis on the role of demand uncertainty. The concept of the stabilization value, which measures that part of the benefit of the storage project which is due solely to the stochastic demand components, is defined. The magnitude of the stabilization value, relative to the overall value of energy storage, is evaluated in terms of a simple model that accounts for the relevant characteristics of the electric power utility's production mix. It is found that neglecting the demand uncertainty can seriously bias the benefit assessment of the storage project as well as the determination of the optimal storage capacity.     

Recurrence relations for Tchebycheffian B-splines

Four-term recurrence relations with constant coefficients are derived for a wide class of T chebycheffian B-splines, LB-splines and complex B-splines. Such a relation exists whenever the differential operator defining the underlying “polynomial” space can be factored in two essentially different ways. The four lower order B-splines in the recurrence relation appear in two pairs, each pair corresponding to one of these factorization. It is shown that the two-term recurrence relations for polynomial, trigonometric and hyperbolic B-splines as well as other known two-term recurrence relations are obtained directly from the four-term recurrence relations in a unified and systematic way. The above derivation also yields two different two-term recurrence relations for Green’s functions of these “polynomial” spaces In this context the special examples of exponential functions and rational functions are analyzed in detail.     

The spectrum of a one-dimensional hierarchical model

The spectrum of a discrete Schrödinger operator with a hierarchically distributed potential is studied both by a renormalization group technique and by numerical analysis. A suitable choice of the potential makes it possible to reduce the original problem to a two-dimensional map. Scaling laws for the band-edge energyE _be and for the integrated density of states are predicted together with the global properties of the spectrum. Different scaling regimes are obtained depending on a hierarchy positive parameterR: for R<1/2 the usual scaling laws for the periodic case are obtained, while forR>1/2 the scaling behavior depends explicitly onR.     

Strictly positive definite functions on spheres in Euclidean spaces

In this paper we study strictly positive definite functions on the unit sphere of the -dimensional Euclidean space. Such functions can be used for solving a scattered data interpolation problem on spheres. Since positive definite functions on the sphere were already characterized by Schoenberg some fifty years ago, the issue here is to determine what kind of positive definite functions are actually strictly positive definite. The study of this problem was initiated recently by Xu and Cheney (Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 116 (1992), 977--981), where certain sufficient conditions were derived. A new approach, which is based on a critical connection between this problem and that of multivariate polynomial interpolation on spheres, is presented here. The relevant interpolation problem is subsequently analyzed by three different complementary methods. The first is based on the de Boor-Ron general ``least solution for the multivariate polynomial interpolation problem'. The second, which is suitable only for , is based on the connection between bivariate harmonic polynomials and univariate analytic polynomials, and reduces the problem to the structure of the integer zeros of bounded univariate exponentials. Finally, the last method invokes the realization of harmonic polynomials as the polynomial kernel of the Laplacian, thereby exploiting some basic relations between homogeneous ideals and their polynomial kernels.