Across

5. order one ___: thousand

7. watcher of RTO: monitor

9. ___ charge adjustment: annual

11. planning for the whole east: eipc

12. how many megawatts can go: atc

13. in charge of a hearing: alj

14. agency before FERC: fpc

16. accepted as a power plant: qf

17. contract you can count on: firm

18. lines that FERC approves: pipelines

20. big gas law: ngpa

21. depression era law: puhca

23. Carter law: purpa

26. region without markets: south

27. supply's opposite: demand 

Received your March issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly? Then you saw the blood on the pages. 

The fateful year 1929 ushered in two milestones in the history of publishing. That January, just nine months before the stock market crash, Public Utilities Fortnightly put out its first issue. Even more monumental, that same month saw the debut of The Funnies, the predecessor to the American comic book.

The Funnies laid the groundwork for Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, started in 1933. Historians consider it the first true comic book. 

Those depression years were a time of despair. Comics offered welcome if temporary relief.

"Elections and Electrons: Who Will Win in '96," was the article's title, in the March 15, 1996 issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly, 20 years ago. The author analyzed annual electricity sales growth and observed weak growth in the years that President Jimmy Carter lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and that George H.W. Bush lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton, in 1992.

How many lights are there in a home? The Energy Department counted. In a report published three years ago, for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, it estimated that there were 67 lights in the average American home.

Seems like a lot. But you have to include everything. The six-bulb chandelier. That's six lights. The lights in the garage, those at the front steps, in closets and the cellar. Those are totaled too.

A house's bedrooms have 16 lights on average. And the bathrooms have another 10. The exterior has another 9. 

Yesterday's column said that zero-emissions electricity amounted to an impressive 37.4 percent of grid electricity in December 2015. It looks like we have the greenest grid in anyone's memory.

Where did that 120,633 thousand megawatt-hours of electricity come from that emitted no greenhouse gases? Including the clean power produced by distributed generation.

Good news this Monday morn. You probably saw Friday the Commerce Department's announcement about the nation's Gross Domestic Product, the GDP. Buried in the many numbers used to figure out the GDP, electric bills were just 1.4 percent of personal consumption expenditures. 

Over two-thirds of the GDP is spent by and for individuals and families. These personal expenditures amount to a big number, more than twelve and a half trillion dollars. 

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.