[BETA] Fortnightly

"It's going to take a lost of time to understand all the pies."

It's almost spring. There's a new energy secretary(emisn't there? And at least for new electric restructuring bills in Congress. Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) is chairing "workshops" on deregulation at the Energy and Natural Resources committee.

Everyone's wondering: Which bill take hold? Where will it be and how will it look by the end of the legislative session: dead, alive, or limp?

American National Power announced three executive changes: Joseph E. Cofelice, senior v.p., was given the added post of COO; Jim Murray, senior v.p., was given additional duties of CFO; and David L. Coke, director-asset optimization, was promoted to operations v.p.

Peter W. Delaney, a cost-cutting commissioner in the New York Office of General Services, was appointed senior v.p.-business services at the New York Power Authority. The Authority also promoted Gerard V. Loughran, a principal attorney, to v.p.-human resources.

The Institute of Gas Technology (IGT) elected Roger A.

What do the first months of trading say about the spread between spot markets and futures prices?

ust over nine months ago the New York Mercantile

Exchange opened trading in the first-ever electricity futures contracts. As occurred

previously in oil and gas, futures trading in electricity

promises to play a central role in

commodity markets (em markets that are gradually evolving as competitive.

Electricity futures also provide a valuable tool for managers at utilities or other power producers.

AT&T and U S WEST scored points with investors, but PacTel's AirTouch deal failed to move the market.ell before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed, it had become abundantly clear to telephone companies that they would need to change their organizational or corporate structures to keep pace with the changing business and regulatory climate.

The question, however, was how to make that structural change pay off on Wall Street (em how to use the reorganizati

"Utility mentality" has become synonymous with a clinging dependence upon regulation to protect an organization from risk and competition. It also denotes momentum planning and management (em that is, using past performance to project future performance. This way of thinking made sense when companies could count on regulators to shield them from market forces and competition.

The prospect of deregulation has induced a wave of mergers among electric utilities. Most of these mergers would fail an antitrust review because, by combining generation assets of interconnected utilities, they have substantially reduced potential competition in generation.

MAY

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The Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy's Project for the Study of Public Regulation and the Environment, Maine's Future Energy Policy, Augusta Civic Center, Augusta, ME

(207) 581-1539

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Association of Energy Engineers, The New Power Market: Opportunities for Producers, Sellers & Users of

"Anyone who assumes rural electric cooperatives will not be fully engaged in whatever system we have . . . if they assume the more competitive it becomes, the less we'll be engaged . . . they're very wrong."

(em Glenn English, CEO,

National Rural Electric

Cooperative Association

Ten terms as a U.S. Representative from Oklahoma's Sixth District taught Glenn English how to build consensus.

The decision in September by Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., millionaire businessman sans political experience, to launch a bid for the White House in 1996 prompts comparison with another millionaire businessman and political neophyte, Wendell L. Willkie, who defied conventional wisdom 55 years ago and won the GOP nomination to oppose Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election.

Forbes himself relishes the comparison.

One of my first assignments when I was a reporter for this magazine was a story on the flap over the Environmental Protection Agency's 1990 draft report on electromagnetic fields (EMF).