LDCs: That Giant Sucking Sound
The consequences of short-sighted rate making.
Gas utilities and state commissions must work together to help preserve rates of return, encourage conservation, and lower customers’ bills.
Cost
Breaking the Gridlock
A proposal to remove the bottlenecks on grid investment.
The lack of transmission investment transcends the usual culprits, pointing to a serious flaw in market structure.
Reliability Wars
Power System Planning: Who gets paid (and how much) for backing up the system?
“Confining transmission projects to FTR payments is like confining generators to energy-only payments,” says Ed Krapels, the electric industry consultant from Boston who helped dream up the initial idea of the Neptune project. These words speak volumes on what’s happening in today’s power industry, and on what the ISOs and RTOs are trying to achieve, not only for merchant-grid projects but for merchant generation and system reliability.
Building a Better Utility
Many of the obstacles and strategic issues that utilities face today are all too familiar. This time they must be solved with a different business model.
We overbuild, run short, then overbuild again. You'd think we'd learn, because when the forecasts aren't accurate, when overcapacity plagues the industry, companies fail. Can we get the forecasts right? Probably not. But we can plan for forecasts that will be wrong. They always are. And they will be until the system is redesigned to let prices clear the market.
A National Gasification Strategy
Presenting a program to stimulate robust coal-gasification technology deployment at low federal cost.
Federal loan guarantees and other incentives can clear the hurdles to near-term deployment of gasification technologies.
Mastering the Mastering Agreement
Special Series Part 5: How to find "commercially reasonable" valuation in power contract terminations.
Contract termination should be easy. Consult the applicable master agreement, calculate the close-out amount, and send or receive a check. If only it were so. In this discussion, we investigate the guidance offered in the key electricity master agreements regarding the calculation of settlement amounts following an event of default and subsequent termination. We also illustrate what we perceive to be a "commercially reasonable" or "good faith" approach to determining settlement amounts.
Gas Executives Forum: The New Downstream Dynamic
Gas distributors tell how their business strategies are changing in response to issues such as higher gas prices, electric M&A, LNG, and gas pipeline development.
Does the push for liquefied natural gas raise more questions than it answers? Will natural-gas prices level off? Gas executives from Duke Energy, New Jersey Natural Gas, National Grid USA, Sempra Energy, and Southern Co. tackle the most pressing issues.
The Widening Technological Divide
Increased business and regulatory challenges have utilities lagging in investments to meet energy demand a decade from now.
The electricity enterprise has tended through restructuring to become a victim of its historic success in maintaining universal service reliability at ever-lower cost. The essential foundation for restoring enterprise vitality in the coming decade is rebuilding this fundamental public/private partnership, based on technology innovations that can increase the value of electricity service, including providing higher levels of reliability and security.
Commission Watch
What everybody missed in setting up the regional grids.
Commission Watch
What everybody missed in setting up the regional grids.
While the electric utility industry has largely agreed on what elements to include in a standard market design (SMD) to govern wholesale power trading in a given region, recent experience shows that the regulators from time to time have overlooked a number of things.
Efficiency and Demand Response: Twins, Siblings, or Cousins?
Analyzing the conservation effects of demand response programs.
Does demand response increase or decrease overall electricity usage?