ICAP: A Make-Believe Market?
New England puts a price on electric reliability, but some say the charge looks more like a tax.
Does ICAP qualify as a true commercial product, traded on its own merit with a tangible value for customers?
Wind Power, Poised for Take Off?
A survey of projects and economics.
An industry advocate touts the recent rise of projects in the pipeline and forsees remarkable growth in wind farms over the next twenty years — more, perhaps, than others would concede.
It Ain't Over...'Til It's over: Retail Choice is Working, Despite the Wait for Real Competition
A case study from Maryland on electric restructuring.
A local utility exec admits that Maryland has no truly competitive power market, but claims customer choice is still a good thing.
Should Government Open the Books of the Merchant Gen Sector?
EIA Data Tracking
The EIA also wants to collect data — finances, operations, emissions, fuel consumption and costs — from non-utility generators. What’s the public interest here?
U.S. Gas Production: Can We Trust the Projections?
Government (EIA) forecasts suffer in credibility when compared with geologic assessments.
The EIA predicts that natural gas consumption will climb more than 60 percent percent over 20 years, driving U.S. production up 50-plus percent over the same period. How does that square with geologic assessments?
Weak Underpinnings, and Wrong Conclusions
Work conducted by Management Consulting Services has consistently found a number of truths about co-op distribution service that counter Douglas Beresford's article on IPOs for rural co-ops.
People
David E. Meador, Robert G. Harvey, Dennis Spurgeon, Erroll B. Davis, Jr., and more.
Bullish for Business
Forced consolidation of RTOs would set transmission owners free to go after profits.
Forced consolidation of RTOs would set transmission owners free to go after profits.
X Marks the Spot: How U.K. Utilities Have Fared Under Performance-Based Ratemaking
Returns for U.K. RECs have proven resilient, despite price cuts, efficiency targets, and the windfall profit tax.
Performance-based ratemaking in the United Kingdom is now entering its third "generation," or regulatory period. Due to the sharpened incentives of PBR relative to cost-of-service regulation, the UK has seen a substantial improvement in electricity distribution productivity, annual gains of 3.5 percent. The price cap form of PBR, incorporating an X factor, is being adopted in an increasing number of regions, from the Netherlands to Canada.
On the Origin of Markets: Electricity Evolution in the U.K.
A story of power, pools, and parallels with the U.S. experience.
Those in the United Kingdom don’t talk about privatization and electric restructuring in terms of getting it right the first time ... Instead, they use terms like evolution, waves of development, and system adjustments. Industry restructuring is an evolutionary process, not a switch-it-on, one-time event, as generally is assumed in the U.S.