The purpose of this book is to highlight new challenges and breakthroughs in the electric utilities industry from the viewpoint of customer-oriented perspective. To achieve the above objective, the contents of this book is organized as follows. The first chapter introduces new challenges in the electric utilities industry. The second chapter explains the foundation of the priority service program. Chapter three discusses the role of outage costs and service reliability and chapter four investigates various methods for estimating outage costs. Next, The fifth chapter illustrates real-time pricing program. Then the sixth chapter extends the priority service program in the buy-back, stand-by and electricity wheeling markets. Furthermore, customer interface technology and priority service rate design are set in chapter seven. Institutional challenges and global warming and their influences on priority service program are analyzed in chapter eight and chapter nine, respectively. Finally, chapter ten highlights the future prospects and breakthroughs and author proposes the technology innovation in the renewable energy electricity production and the rehabilitation of the price mechanism in the electric market will be two feasible solutions for the development of electric utilities industry.
