POPS Is Here to Stay
Reports of Plain Old Power Service’s death greatly exaggerated
The vast majority of electric consumers want reliable, clean, reasonably priced electricity, and little else.
Marginal Utility
The Carbon Paradigm Shift
The telephone companies dumped land lines for cellular, and prospered, thanks to their size, ability to raise funds, and name recognition. They migrated to a new paradigm. Can’t electricity providers?
Action Needed Now To Prevent More Nuclear Plant Closures
Threat to nearly one-fifth of our nation’s ninety-nine reactors is real
Individually, these closures are understandable financial decisions. But the cumulative impact endangers any chance of meeting U.S. climate change goals.
A Robotic Concrete Crawler
Play Station Controls Guide Robot on Concrete Inspection Trips
EPRI has designed a robot for inspecting hard-to-reach concrete surfaces. A robotic inspection system would eliminate the need to use scaffolding or rappelling for routine structural evaluations, eliminating the associated setup challenges, time requirements, costs, and safety hazards.
Here Comes the Sun
Growing Impacts of Residential Solar on Utility Customer Service
What does PV mean for utilities’ residential customer service operations? From helping customers with supplier selection, through installation and maintenance issues? And with billing? To begin to address this question, we conducted two sets of surveys of residential electricity customers in the second quarter of 2016.
Public Weighs In on Market Conditions Threatening Nuclear Power Plants
Examining the problem for nuclear power shows value in informing the public.
What should be done to create market conditions to prevent the loss of the nation’s only zero-carbon large-scale baseload electricity source?
Ratemaking and the Campaign Against Rooftop Solar
Rate design should balance consumer and investor interests.
Regulators should ensure that changes to rate design seek to balance consumer and utility interests. Rates that are intended to insulate utilities from economic and technological change while providing no benefits to consumers ought to be considered unjust, unreasonable, and unduly discriminatory.
Energy Company's Pipe Dream
Why $3.3 Billion Northeast Energy Direct Pipeline Was Defeated
It’s a David and Goliath story. But instead of a slingshot, David in this case fired off a stiff legal challenge to defeat the giant.
Geomagnetic Disturbances and the Grid
Harmonics Studies Needed to Assess Vulnerabilities
NERC recently issued reliability standards in response to the potential for geomagnetic disturbances to disrupt operations and possibly damage assets. The power industry appears to have placed undue emphasis on GMD’s threat to transformers. Our studies and those by others have underscored the value to transmission organizations in assessing their vulnerability to harmonics.
Regulators Can Win the Trifecta with Residential Demand Charges
Advanced metering and demand charges give efficient and equitable price signals to customers.
The wide deployment of smart meters gives regulatory policy-makers a rare opportunity to change residential rate design. This can be done in a way that improves economic efficiency, and utility consumer and shareholder equity. Here we provide ten questions that should be asked by policy-makers, as well as some guidance in deriving the answers.