Renewable Energy in the 21st Century:
Perspective
Renewable Energy in the 21st Century:
State involvement in promoting renewable technologies has profound implications for the future of the energy industry.
Election-year posturing seems to have prevented the federal government from reaching consensus on a number of energy issues ranging from standard market design to global warming, MBTE to Kyoto, ANWR to nuclear waste disposal.
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.
New Opportunities: Dynegy Inc. announced that Carolyn M. Campbell has been named group general counsel-corporate finance & securities, and corporate secretary. Campbell joins Dynegy from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP.
Financial data raises doubts about whether deregulation benefits outweigh costs.
The need for additional generation to compensate for wind variations is disappearing.
Transmission Upgrades:
How to allocate the costs.
Efforts to establish and quantify congestion-reduction and loss-reduction projects are progressing in electric markets with locational marginal price (LMP) regimes. The Path 15 upgrade approval by the California ISO two years ago was largely based upon its economic benefits. A draft report from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), , states that ERCOT will consider transmission projects that are "economically justified by the reduction of congestion and losses."1
STATE REGULATORS:
Can natural gas supply keep up with demand for power?
Interviews
Things are looking up for the energy industry, but tough issues remain. Regulators-forced to grapple with the mismatch between volatile natural-gas prices and years of building gas-fired power plants-have learned a thing or two. They now insist on new rate schemes and risk-management methods while promoting the use of liquefied natural gas.
ECM
Demand-Side Management & Metering Tech
Combining real-time usage data with the newest technology can earn benefits for utilities.
Some amount of confusion on the part of end-users of electricity is inevitable as the electricity industry evolves. Confusion seems to be a necessary ingredient of change. At PJM Interconnection, we see fusion as the answer to confusion. First is the fusion of technology-both computing and communications technology-with the electric industry.
Commission Watch
Assimilating the best of the regulated-utility and merchant models.
Vertically integrated utilities (VIUs) have served us well and do not need to be dismantled in the name of competition.
While NAESB and NERC struggle over the issue, North America steadily drifts toward unreliability.
Time is running out. It's been more than two years since the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Joint Inadvertent Interchange Taskforce (JIITF), on which I served, issued its white paper[1] proposing how to price the unscheduled power (inadvertent interchange)1 flowing between NERC-certified balancing authorities (BAs).