THE T.A.P. DATABASE
Currently the TAP database contains over 400 electricity
tariffs from over 100 utilities from14 countries.
One of the key innovations in the development of TAP
is the design of a data-table format that is flexible
enough to accommodate the wide range of tariff structures
encountered in practice. This general data-table can be
thought of as a "universal tariff template". Specific
tariffs are represented by filling in some of the available
fields. TAP currently accommodates the following rate design
features for electricity tariffs:
- Fixed, energy and demand charges
- Block rates with constant or variable block sizes
- Hours charges, seasonal rates, time-of use rates
In addition to the actual rates, understanding electricity
pricing requires access to information about the variety of
tariffs offered by a utility, including service types, customer
classes, geographic constraints etc. This additional information
is built into TAP (see diagram), and allows the user of the
database to sample the set of tariffs according to a wide variety
of criteria.
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