[BETA] Fortnightly

The business case for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) can’t be justified alone on operational savings to the utility. But critical assumptions involving process improvements and system efficiencies depend on customer involvement. This sequel to a September 2009 article examines customer engagement strategies and techniques.

The power grid has been slow to embrace renewable energy sources. In order to allow renewable energy sources to evolve into a solution rather than a headache, new tools and processes will need to be developed to forecast and control renewable production capabilities.

Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t fill a small room with energy CEOs interested in discussing how credit risk affects their companies’ bottom lines. But a recent series of contract defaults, bankruptcies, Sarbanes-Oxley controls, and merger-and-acquisition activity has placed credit-risk management squarely on the industry’s radar. Today, it’s clear that an integrated risk system that measures, monitors, and manages credit-related risk is no longer a Wall Street extravagance, but rather an industry essential.

The ability to provide reliable capacity is becoming both riskier and more costly to society and investors alike.

ISO's new ICAP scheme seen as subsidy for the gen sector.

For evidence that electric restructuring has lost its way, look no further than ICAP-the dubious idea that to guarantee reliability and low prices, regulators should create a market not just for trading the finished commodity, but also for buying and selling ownership rights in the future ability to produce.

FERC faces a growing chorus of rebellion on earnings incentives.

"If I may say, today, we the states are the chosen ones." That was Virginia utility commissioner Hullihen ("Hulli") W. Moore, speaking on the phone in January with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Pat Wood and other federal and state regulators, trying to untangle the business of transmission reform.

 

A call for utilities to leave the marketing business.

Many of us on the front lines can identify with Stanley Klein's observation that, in terms of its implementation, the restructuring of the electric power industry is "fundamentally an information technology event."¹

How to justify green power without apologizing for the price.

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Policymakers have shown considerable interest in the concept of a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), and how it might affect the cost of energy.

The RPS would require electricity providers to include a small amount of renewables-based power - typically less than 3 percent or 4 percent - in their resource mix.