APS

While maintaining its stance as the most sophisticated competitive electricity market in the country, PJM still faces several challenges, all of which are augmented by its expanded footprint. Most prominent is the RTO’s plan to implement a new reliability pricing model. Further, parts of PJM are ailing from transmission congestion issues that limit access to abundant, cheap power sources in the region.

(February 2007) The Electric Power Research Institute appointed Bryan Hannegan vice president for environment research and development. PNGC Power named John Prescott senior vice president of power supply. Nora Mead Brownell joined the Comverge Inc. board of directors. The Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator Inc. announced the election of two new members to its board of directors: Michael J. Curran and Eugene W. Zeltmann. And others...

Utilities in the United States are heading into uncharted territories, and the regulatory landscape is changing accordingly. To learn what it takes to tame this new territory, we spoke with three FERC commissioners, a state regulator, and a Western governor.

As the industry’s regulatory risks and capital requirements expand, financing will come with a higher price tag—and another cost pressure in the ratemaking process.

The march of technology, the urgent call for greater grid investment, and a painful recent past have caught up with the utilities industry. One key area of preventative maintenance for utilities is the transformer, many of which are decades old. Representing approximately $200 billion in investment, these units—which currently number approximately 100,000—can’t be replaced overnight.

Forget the mega merger as a means to acquire new power plants. FERC’s new rules may offer a better path.

If “perfect” be the enemy of the “good,” then look no further for proof than in Federal Power Act section 217(b)(4), enacted by Congress in EPACT 2005.

Major transmission projects based on two distinct models are showing signs of life. What can these projects teach us about future transmission investment?

FERC proposed a new set of regulations, under the new section 219 of the Federal Power Act, explaining in broad outline how it might approve generous financial incentives for new investments in transmission—incentives once dubbed as “candy.” As of mid-January, the new NOPR had spawned more industry comment than just about any other FERC proposal in recent memory.

When FERC opened wholesale power markets to competition a decade ago in Order No. 888, it codified a system for awarding grid access known as the pro forma Open-Access Transmission Tariff (OATT), founded on physical rights, and on the fiction that electrons travel along a “contract path.” Should the commission “tinker” with the OATT, making only surgical changes to make it current? Or, do events instead warrant a complete overhaul?