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The Iranian electricity market is undergoing the first decade of restructuring. Effective competition in wholesale electricity market is a necessary feature of successful electricity industry restructuring. The paper examines the degree of competition in the Iranian electricity market during March to September 2009. The competitive benchmark analysis has been used to simulate producer’s behavior as a price taker firms and compare the competitive market results with actual market outcomes. The competitive benchmark has been calculated through generation costs of producers. Moreover, the possibility of execution market power has been considered by structural index. The finding indicates that the Iranian electricity market has a considerable potential to exercise power market and there were significant departure from competitive behavior during 2009.

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This paper aims to determine the optimum price of electricity during restructuring process. We maximized social welfare function subject to market equilibrium, maximum production capacity of each group of power plants, maximum demand of each consumer type and the potential of electricity export and import. The model was run using 2007 monthly and annual data by means of GAMS optimization software. The calculated electricity shadow price for the year 2007 was 371.2 per KWh. To get more exact results we run the model for each month separately. The results show that the price of electricity in spring and summer is lower than fall and winter, for marginal cost of power provision in winter rises. This is due to substitution of gas by gasoil and other liquid fuels and also reduction of hydropower production. For both intervals the actual price has a significant deviation from optimum price in Iranian power market.