Zambia, the landlocked and poor country in Southern Africa, is suffering a crippling power shortage. Musing about this, I find it extraordinary that there are no reliable, affordable, and portable power supply units that could be brought in to help Zambia.

An economical commercial process is needed to provide an incentive for the utility industries to engender win-win support for governmental regulations on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. The current approach is carbon capture and sequestration. Recently, however, an alternative has emerged: a proprietary process that converts CO₂ into syngas (CO & H₂). Thereafter, the syngas can be converted to fuels such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, methanol, and/or ethanol with the use of established mature technologies.

By September 1997, Philadelphia Electric Co. had outflanked key opponents and filed a proposed partial settlement with the Penn. PUC to allow the company to recover costs that might become stranded under a new law (enacted a year before) that had brought a measure of competition to the state’s electric utility industry. Then Enron went to work.

Why is there is there so much controversy about investments in transmission and distribution? We suggest it’s because the benefits are poorly understood – or even ignored.

Several utility regulatory bodies have initiatives tailored to help secure remote access to the electric power grid from cybercrime. The most notable of these efforts comes from the North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC), with the realization of Version 5 of its Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) standard, which goes into effect on April 1, 2016.

Distributed generation marks a set of emerging technologies requiring creativity from utilities and regulators in introducing laws, policies, and economic incentives – to ensure that revenue streams are captured and that cost recovery reflects market reality.

In the emerging era of distributed energy resources, we will find the distribution utility increasingly in the role of an integrator and enabler – more than their longstanding role as energy provider. Accordingly, the regulatory approach must go through its own structural shift to keep pace and restore the system to regulatory equilibrium.