Executive and academic views on what to fix and what's not broke.
The sound and fury over trading scandals, credit defaults, and market manipulation so far has drowned out much of the mind-numbing debate over a standard market design (SMD), and rightly so. Utilities understand (as does the press) that Enron, "Deathstar," and "Get Shorty" will always sell more newspapers than locational pricing or congestion management.
On the virtues and vices of ICAP, ACAP, FTRs, hubs, flowgates, DAMs, and gaming.
Making sense of RTO Week, the mediation talks, and FERC's promised new rulemaking.
Dynegy's senior vice president Peter Esposito didn't think much about the celebrated mediation talks on forming a single, unified transmission grid for the Northeast U.S.
News Digest
News Digest
Do not mistake the FERC's professed neutrality on what works best for regional transmission organizations.
In its final rule on regional transmission organizations, known as Order 2000,[Fn.1] the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said it would not dictate to the electric utility industry whether and how to form RTOs. Don't be misled. The FERC claims to be agnostic,[Fn.2] but it still has a vision. And that vision leads inexorably to one conclusion. The preferred form for an RTO is the independent system operator, or ISO.
State regulators turn to telecom to salvage the clout they've lost in energy.
State public utility commissions now seem to spend more time on telecommunications than electricity or natural gas. That's their new power base. The telephone local loop marks the one place where state regulators still have clout.
To test that notion, let's see who attended last month's annual meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, held in San Antonio. By my count, out of the first 500 registered attendees, over 120 (24 percent) came from telecommunications firms.
MIT professor Paul Joskow asks the FERC how its rulemaking will help consumers.
By Aug. 23, the electric industry had filed over 150 separate comments - nearly 4,000 pages - telling the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission what it thinks about regional transmission organizations.
All other stories pale in comparison. The commission's proposed rulemaking on RTOs would reinvent the electric transmission business. The case gives economists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to instruct a government agency how to design and build a market from the ground up.
Tales of bad faith, cold feet and price manipulation.
Lollipops"/fn1/ and "loopholes." "Islands" and "peninsulas." Utilities have invented a colorful new lexicon to explain what's happening at power pools and regional transmission groups. Yet the basic issue remains familiar: How to gain a competitive advantage.
IF AN INDEPENDENT SYSTEM OPERATOR OVERSEES THE TRANS-
mission grid, how much independence is too much? Should ISOs cede control over dispatch to scheduling coordinators, or market functions to a power exchange? Addressing some of these questions, a new report released in April by The Progress & Freedom Foundation criticizes a restructured electric industry built on ISOs with restricted authority.