Electricity Market Reform in Japan
Bumpy Road Ahead
This is the first in a series of three articles related to power market reform in Japan and its implications both for Japan and globally.
capacity
Electricity's Capacity Factor, a Problem?
Electric infrastructure is used half the time on average. Is this a problem requiring rapid radical reform?
Some of you take the subway to work. What’s the capacity factor of the subway system? Our electric grid provides enormous value to its customers, with a combination of infrastructure and workforces with varying capacity factors.
Business Model Mashup
Three ‘power plays’ for utilities seeking growth.
Threats to the utility business model mean that it’s time to make choices about future growth to protect cash flows while investing in new ventures.
Regional Economic Benefits
Why are they ignored in transmission planning?
Why is there is there so much controversy about investments in transmission and distribution? We suggest it’s because the benefits are poorly understood – or even ignored.
Gas Pipelines for New England
A consumer model that compounds public benefits.
Natural gas used for electric generation is running headfirst into the lack of sufficient pipeline capacity. The magnitude of these changes demands a fresh look at business practices, especially in New England, which is suffering while neighboring regions benefit from the Marcellus Shale bonanza.
PJM's Three-Way Proposal
A re-defined capacity product, revised parameters for generator performance, and a new role for demand response.
The proposal creates a new capacity product called the “Capacity Performance Resource.”
Playing Safe with Capacity Markets
PJM would minimize risk, but so did regulation.
Changes envisioned by PJM call for ever more structured markets, further reducing the scope of the competitive landscape from which RTOs arose. They may produce a system that is actually more costly and less innovative than regulation.
Public Power Road Show
Sue Kelly’s ‘world tour’ brings APPA home.
There’s no one in the energy industry – and I mean absolutely no one – who is more on-message than Sue Kelly, now winding up her first year as CEO of the American Public Power Association.
The Death of the Grid?
As Mark Twain would say, the reports are exaggerated.
Contrary to rumor, the grid won’t die, but in fact must grow exponentially, in function, complexity, and usefulness.
$9 Billion at Risk
If PJM markets should lose demand response as a capacity resource.
The AEMA sees the self-help DR revolution as a key to America’s recent industrial renaissance: “If demand response is removed from wholesale markets,” the group says, then “the electric grid is back to the rotary phone.”