Bidding to Win: The Economics of Renewable RFPs
How project developers form their bidding strategies – and what it means for prices and the industry.
Want to find out what utilities seek when collecting bids for wind and solar projects? Read on.
portfolio
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.
Climate, Carbon, Fuel, and the Future
The view from Oregon and Portland General Electric.
Fortnightly speaks with Jim Piro, president and CEO of Portland General Electric. Piro serves as a member of Oregon’s Global Warming Commission. He’s also active in the Electrification Coalition, a national group of business leaders advocating for policies that support electric vehicles.
EPA's Clean Power Plan
Charting a Path Forward
With respect to the Clean Power Plan, the question is whether EPA will address the major issues and reinforce its positions in advance of the anticipated legal challenges.
Utilities Cutting Cord to Coal
It’s not personal. It’s just business.
With coal’s troubles piling up, so too are stories about the industry’s “bleak” future in the United States – a casualty of cheap natural gas, thinning coal seams, and the pursuit of lower-carbon alternatives. Just as conspicuous: utilities, which have long allied themselves with the coal developers, are retiring their older coal units in droves.
CEOs are Charged Up
But guiding their companies in times of change is a challenging task.
It’s a new era for utilities and their consumers. Today’s leaders are atop those economic, political and technological happenings.
The Driving Ambition of Elon Musk
An electric car in every driveway, a battery in every garage.
Tesla’s Elon Musk is driving the electric car off the lot and onto the premises of America’s electric utilities, proposing to build and sell energy storage batteries on both a residential and grid-wide scale – ideas that the chief executive will fully flesh out at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in New Orleans this June.
In New York's Distributed Energy Future, Will Co-Generation Still Reign?
Distributed energy has a long history in the state – with co-generation, or combined heat and power, playing the dominant role. How is that portfolio changing today?
Combined heat and power still leads the Empire State in market penetration by distributed resources, but costs are not falling as fast as for storage or solar PV.
A Greener Standard Offer
A new model to help restructured states add renewables to the default service portfolio.
By taking the intermittent supply of the renewable generator out of the generator’s compensation, the developer (and lenders) receive the stability they crave while supply customers avoid products they do not need.
Triggering & Tailoring
What the Supreme Court said, and didn’t.
Justice Scalia saw the need for tailoring as proof that EPA’s Triggering Rule was mistaken.