People
The California Independent System Operator board of governors hired Yakout Mansour to be its president and CEO. And others...
Reliability
Efficiency and Demand Response: Twins, Siblings, or Cousins?
Analyzing the conservation effects of demand response programs.
Does demand response increase or decrease overall electricity usage?
Distributed Generation: Who Benefits?
<font color="red">Distributed Generation</font>
Distributed Generation
In the first of three articles, experts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory examine the technical obstacles, deployment, and economic issues surrounding distributed generation.
The existing electric power delivery system is a critical part of this country's economic and societal infrastructure, and proposals to increase the role of distributed energy resources (DER) within this system are welcomed by few in the utility industry.
IT Roundtable: The Digitized Grid
Data gathering and controllability offer the quickest path to reliability.
Technology leaders at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative present their visions of energy IT in the 21st century.
Merchant Power: Ratepayers Back At Risk
A review of power plant deals in 2004 shows that utilities are buying.
Whether evolution or devolution, the merchant deals done to date show movement to a familiar structure; ratepayers are back at risk. While ratepayers have benefitted from merchant plants, they also paid since competition began with PURPA in 1978, and many of the acquisitions put them at risk for future changes in power values and fuel costs.
LICAP and Its Lessons: A Kink in the Curve
Doubts intensify over New England’s radical new market for electric capacity.
What began nearly two years ago as a simple request by power producers to boost their chances for recovering fixed costs for several power plants in Connecticut has mushroomed into the single most complicated case now pending before FERC.
An Expensive Experiment? RTO Dollars and Sense
Financial data raises doubts about whether deregulation benefits outweigh costs.
This year, U.S. electricity consumers will spend more than $1 billion financing the operation of six RTOs. RTO costs have nearly doubled since 2001. Restructuring the energy industry was more costly and more risky than anticipated, and reasonable estimates of RTO costs outweigh nearly all of the benefits anticipated.
Transmission Upgrades: Who Pays?
How to allocate the costs.
An author examines the impact of hypothetical congestion-reduction projects on generators and loads that are part of a vertically integrated utility, and generators independently owned in a deregulated environment.
State Regulators: Driven By Reliability
Can natural gas supply keep up with demand for power?
Reliability and utility infrastructure development remain regulators’ top concerns. This year’s Regulators Forum spans the different regions of the country to highlight the most pressing issues facing the industry.
Debilitating Doctrine
How the filed-rate policy wreaks havoc — and what courts can do about it.
Like many venerable legal rules, the filed-rate doctrine is rarely questioned. Over the last century, it has served many important purposes. However, with deregulated wholesale electric power markets at the federal level and various degrees of deregulation across the states, both the doctrine's continued applicability and usefulness are suspect.