reliability standards

Generation Roundtable: Power Flux

Generators struggle to plan for the future as they cope with an unstable present.

In a roundtable discussion, generation experts explain how environmental regulations, industry restructuring, investor confidence, and the bottom line are affecting their decision-making.

The Myth of the Transmission Deficit

The grid does not need a Marshall Plan for new investment.

Do we really need to invest $50 billion to $100 billion in the U.S. transmission system? The industry says yes, but the evidence says otherwise.

Energy Technology: Winner Take All

A review of which technologies and companies stand to win and lose as a result of the 2003 blackout.

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.

Izzbee, Izz it?

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.

News Digest (July 15, 2001)

Compiled June 21, 2001 by Bruce W. Radford, editor-in-chief, from contributions as noted from Carl J. Levesque, associate editor, and Phillip S. Cross and Lori A. Burkhart, contributing legal editors.