Duke Energy’s Jim Turner and other utility executives weigh the odds on billion-dollar bets.
The heavy investment required for new generation technologies clearly is a global phenomenon, but global-resource competition to build power plants is making power-plant development more expensive—and may even limit the number that any one utility in any one country can develop.
How important is the risk function at your company?
Wither the chief risk officer (CRO)? Some utilities have moved risk staff under the CFO or controller, while other utilities have pushed CROs down the management hierarchy. But risk remains, and a rudimentary risk function will not do.
Billions in new revenue could be realized early in the transition.
In a hydrogen-electric economy, power companies could see very large market opportunities—and play a major role in enabling and accelerating implementation.
Using demand response to mitigate rate shocks.
In the minds of many policy-makers, DR has become associated with rate shocks, rate volatility, unpredictability, and loss of control over energy costs—the very things DR was designed to overcome. What can be done to change this?
IT officers are getting more efficient, but guess what keeps them up at night?
Ever-present security concerns are keeping utility chief information officers up at night. With their IT budgets under constraints in a back-to-basics era, four CIOs speak out about their concerns over funding, staffing, and the future.
Rothschild investment banker Roger Wood explains why those new infrastructure funds are hot on utilities.
He was quite literally the toast of last year’s EEI Finance conference. Using his bank’s diverse resources (Rothschild vineyards in France), he arranged an unforgettable wine tasting that was a big hit with utility executives. Roger Wood, the head of Rothschild’s Power & Utilities Group in North America, is one of the few true white knights on Wall Street. Whereas many banks have developed businesses that can conflict with their utility clients’ interests, Wood says Rothschild’s bankers “live and die by providing long-term independent advice.”
Has restructuring succeeded on either continent?
The era of polemics about electric competition is nearly over. It’s time to compare the relative performance of competition and traditional regulation as these two established models operate side-by-side.
Can utilities simultaneously manage rising costs and pressing capital investment needs?
Does the utility industry have the financial strength sufficient to meet the combined challenges of: (1) sharply increasing and highly volatile fuel and purchased-power costs; (2) significant capital investment requirements; and (3) rising interest rates?
How to develop, implement, and operate a security program.
In May 2, 2006, the NERC board of trustees adopted the Critical Infrastructure Protection Cyber Security Standard. This article provides some answers to questions in the form of security program development, implementation, and operation.
As NERC’s CIP standards advance, utilities move ahead, haltingly, with implementation.
Utilities are preparing for the eventual enforcement of new reliability rules from the North American Electric Reliability Council. As the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission continues its review of the proposed standards, we take a closer look at the effect of these rules on cyber-security, and offer a broad overview of all of the proposed reliability standards.