It was 1981. Steve Jobs and Woz (aka Steve Wozniak) started selling what were called micro-computers. These were micro enough for a small business like mine to buy and figure out how to use.

We were pumped. Before long, we coded programs to perform system planning, cost of service, and revenue requirement analyses for utilities.  It was incredible these could be done on an Apple II. 

Awkward though. As when users had to continuously switch between the five and a quarter inch diskettes for the programs and data, in the external disk drive.

Twenty years ago, in February 1996, the cover of Public Utilities Fortnightly was emblazoned with the words: Competitive Generation: Are We There Yet? The lead article was authored by Ruth Kretschmer, a highly respected commissioner on the Illinois Commerce Commission. 

Kretschmer served as a regulator there for twenty years, July 1983 - December 2002. She also chaired the Commission for a time, as well as the NARUC Gas Committee. 

Jim Gordon knows energy. For the last 26 years, he's been an energy plant developer. He was the head of a New England-based power producer named Energy Management Inc., and now he's president of Cape Wind Associates. He's also an environmentalist. He believes in the benefits of clean energy, and his latest project-a 460 MW wind farm off the coast off Cape Cod is a testament to that. The wind farm, slated to go online sometime in 2005, is the first offshore wind farm proposed in the United States.

10,000-Number of cubic feet of gas consumed each hour by the Olympic flame cauldron at the University of Utah's Rice‑Eccles Stadium during the 2002 Salt Lake City winter Olympic games. -Source: Questar Gas

77 million-Number of cubic feet of gas consumed by fleet of natural gas vehicles used during the 1996 Atlanta summer Olympics. American Gas Association Clean Air Team member companies donated the gas and a portion of the fleet of vehicles to the Atlanta games. -Source: American Gas Association

Less than a year after the Bush administration offered the nuclear industry several words of encouragement in its national energy policy plan, the industry won a second opportunity to smile when Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in January formally embraced Nevada's Yucca Mountain, about 80 miles from Las Vegas, as the underground repository for thousands of tons of high‑level nuclear waste from across the country.

As market forces increasingly enter electricity markets, demand trading has become more prevalent over the last few years in the United States. The differences between high wholesale market prices for electricity and prices paid by retail customers have created significant economic opportunities. The immediate beneficiaries include sellers of electricity with access to the wholesale market and large electricity customers with a desire-and the ability-to reduce demand.

The advent of deregulated wholesale electricity markets and the penetration of market forces into retail electricity markets have enormously enlarged the set of opportunities for lucrative financial gains. One of these opportunities is demand trading, which represents a key tool that can advance one of deregulation's principal goals-customer choice.