News Digest

 

State PUCs

Restructuring Plans. The Ohio PUC denied rehearing of its restructuring order for FirstEnergy issued two months earlier, rejecting arguments by all petitioners-utility, marketers, and consumer watchdog groups.

Frontlines

Engineers Have Their Day

 

1 Ilic, Zaborszky, "Dynamics and Control of Large Electric Power Systems," John Wiley & Sons, 2000 (800 page text).

2 Ilic, Arce, Yoon, Fumagali, "Assessing Reliability Under Open Access," to be published in The Electricity Journal, December 2000.

3 For more information, please contact the author and/or the MIT Technology Licensing Office, making reference to MIT Case # 9062.

1 Some utilities may question this concept. San Diego Gas & Electric argued in California's DG investigation that distributed generation does not always lead to a reduction in distribution plant investment, and that any investment savings is not kilowatt for kilowatt. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken a more extreme position, allowing a utility to charge a fee for distributed generators delivering electricity into the distribution grid.

Off Peak

October 1, 2000

Dereg Dilemma

Why do U.S. electric bills continue to climb, when other liberalized Western countries are seeing reductions?

Electric deregulation in the United States isn't slashing consumer bills the way it has in other countries. Despite continuing restructuring, the price of U.S. electricity ranked second-highest in an April survey of 14 major Western economies.

 

News Analysis

 

 

According to the solar industry, a U.S. appeals court decision—and a Southern California Edison petition pending at the FERC—might put them out of business.

"If Edison were to prevail in this, it would have hugely negative implications for the solar operators."

News Digest