Reliability and Markets: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Locational pricing makes the network secure, since the utilities and other market participants get 'paid' to monitor the grid.
Locational pricing makes the network secure, since the utilities and other market participants get 'paid' to monitor the grid.
Generators struggle to plan for the future as they cope with an unstable present.
How far do states rights go in transmission planning?
The grid does not need a Marshall Plan for new investment.
A review of which technologies and companies stand to win and lose as a result of the 2003 blackout.
Mishap, human error, and malice regularly crash the electric system. We have lurched from the Western economic power crisis of 1999-2000 to the Eastern reliability power crisis of 2003. Neither more studies nor more blackouts have changed what's been built-an excessive quantity of large generation plants dependent on relatively few major transmission lines. On its current course, the grid's inevitable destination is disaster.
Market power after two years.
The Energy Industry Standards Board doesn't exist yet, but it's got regulators talking.
More than two years ago, I suggested in this column that regional independent system operators would likely supplant the regional reliability councils as the caretakers of electric system reliability. And that's still possible—if the ISOs move quickly to RTO status, and if the RTOs get cracking right away on adopting uniform business rules. But the FERC may get tired waiting for that to happen.