ASSET MANAGEMENT AND FINANCIAL RISK

摘要

Asset management is the art of balancing performance, cost, and risk. Most utility asset management programs have done a good job of addressing performance and cost, but have either neglected to consider risk or have treated risk in an ad-hoc manner (such as performing risk reviews for cancelled projects). Financial asset management has well-established risk management techniques based on Nobel-prize winning concepts. Diversification theory teaches us that many small investments are less risky than a few large investments. Portfolio theory teaches us that combinations of asset can have better performance-risk characteristics than individual assets, and can be used to generate an efficient frontier of asset combinations. The capital asset pricing model teaches us about the tradeoff between risk and performance, and quantifies the required performance of assets with different levels of risk. Options theory allows us to quantify the value of future decision flexibility. Electric infrastructure asset management, of course, is not the same as financial asset management. Nevertheless, the basic principles of financial asset management can be extended to form a powerful framework for infrastructure asset management. This paper gives a basic introduction to physical and financial asset management, and discusses how the techniques of financial asset management can be modified and applied to electricity infrastructure. The result is a powerful framework that allows asset-level spending decisions to be made in a manner that is best able to balance performance, cost, and risk.