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State Regulators: Driven By Reliability

Can natural gas supply keep up with demand for power?

Reliability and utility infrastructure development remain regulators’ top concerns. This year’s Regulators Forum spans the different regions of the country to highlight the most pressing issues facing the industry.
Byline: 

Lori A. Burkhart

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The New Money Pipelines

Business & Money: Merchant plants now draw investors from three different worlds — each with its own agenda.

It's tempting to chalk up the recent bubble in merchant generation to just another industry cycle, but there's more to consider. Investors have not made a wholesale exit from power finance. It is true that many have taken significant losses. It is also true that some remain wary. Despite all this, investors continue to enter the market and address the needs of the industry today.
Byline: 

Ren Plastina

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FERC Versus Bankruptcy Jurisdiction: A Double-Edged Sword

Commission Watch: Be careful what you wish for.

Financially troubled companies and their actual and potential counter-parties in many cases will continue to have difficulty in assessing business, default, and credit risks. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of bankruptcy court jurisdiction over requests to reject FERC-jurisdictional wholesale electricity sales contracts. Yet the court did not resolve — and arguably magnified — uncertainties about the standard that should be employed by a bankruptcy court in considering such a request.
Byline: 

John P. Ratnaswamy

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Debilitating Doctrine

How the filed-rate policy wreaks havoc — and what courts can do about it.

Like many venerable legal rules, the filed-rate doctrine is rarely questioned. Over the last century, it has served many important purposes. However, with deregulated wholesale electric power markets at the federal level and various degrees of deregulation across the states, both the doctrine's continued applicability and usefulness are suspect.
Byline: 

Jim Rossi

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Power Measurements: Welcome to ComEd, Population 1,281

What did LMPs tell us this summer in PJM's new neighborhood?

With one summer under its belt as a member of PJM, ComEd has been called a complete success by some, boring by others. Using data from Energy Velocity's Market Ops and Weather products, we can see the impact of transmission and weather on ComEd this summer.
Byline: 

Aaron Brasket, Tom Ottem, and Mike McNair

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People: November 2004

People

Jack Hawks took on the added role of EPSA's acting vice president of policy; David Barnes joined Commerce Energy as vice president, Finance & Investor Relations; Terry Winter assumed the newly created position of executive vice president, Advanced Grid Solutions at American Superconductor Corp.; and more.
Byline: 

PUF

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Comments on 'Solving the Crisis in Unscheduled Power'

Letters to the Editor

Robert Blohm's article, "Solving the Crisis in Unscheduled Power," ignores a significant part of the power-scheduling paradigm — that is, it ignores transmission. Every power schedule not only includes load and generation but also a path to move the electricity between those points.
Byline: 

Mark B. Lively

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Playing Russian Roulette

Moscow's ratification of the Kyoto protocol could pose problems for the United States.

It could mark the biggest bungle of the last two administrations: the decision to walk away from the Kyoto Protocol rather than stay and negotiate to U.S. advantage. No one thought Russia would sign and put the treaty in force. But now that Russia's ratification appears imminent, policy wonks in America are scrambling to assess the impact.
Byline: 

Richard Stavros

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Winners and Losers: Utility Strategy and Shareholder Return

Diversified companies lead (and the globals lag) over the past five years.

The unbundling of services and companies in the electricity and natural gas industries have created unprecedented opportunities to reinvent the traditional integrated utility model, with a broader array of attendant risks and rewards. But this past year was clearly one of retrenchment and strategic soul searching, allowing an opportunity to re-examine the sector for winning business formulas.
Byline: 

James Coyne and Prescott Hartshorne

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The AGs' Global Warming Suits: Regulation by Litigation

A recent lawsuit filed by eight state attorneys general will take the industry to the place where bad policy meets with bad economics.

A recent lawsuit filed by eight state attorneys general alleges that various coal-fired generating plants are harming the states' residents because of the plants' carbon dioxide emissions. From an economic and regulatory standpoint, it's difficult to see how this lawsuit, or litigation in general, can be viewed as a prudent approach to environmental mitigation.
Byline: 

Jonathan A. Lesser

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