Breaking the Gridlock
A proposal to remove the bottlenecks on grid investment.
The lack of transmission investment transcends the usual culprits, pointing to a serious flaw in market structure.
LSE
Reliability Wars
Power System Planning: Who gets paid (and how much) for backing up the system?
“Confining transmission projects to FTR payments is like confining generators to energy-only payments,” says Ed Krapels, the electric industry consultant from Boston who helped dream up the initial idea of the Neptune project. These words speak volumes on what’s happening in today’s power industry, and on what the ISOs and RTOs are trying to achieve, not only for merchant-grid projects but for merchant generation and system reliability.
Spot-Market Clearing
Solving the electricity credit malaise.
A monthly billing cycle results in exposures of up to 60 days’ settlement. Participant default is likely, and the potential loss from such an event is significant. Spot-market clearing can solve these problems.
Commission Watch
What everybody missed in setting up the regional grids.
Commission Watch
What everybody missed in setting up the regional grids.
While the electric utility industry has largely agreed on what elements to include in a standard market design (SMD) to govern wholesale power trading in a given region, recent experience shows that the regulators from time to time have overlooked a number of things.
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.
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.
Perspective: MISO, Markets, and Common Sense
Wisconsinites don't fear 'Day 2.' But let's get the grid rights right.
The cost of rushing into poorly designed LMP-based energy markets may far exceed any purported cost increases attributable to any future delayed start-up date for certain portions of the MISO region.
Plants for Sale: Pricing the New Wave
Financial players and load-serving utilities are looking for power asset deals.
Approximately 60 generation asset sales have been announced in the past two years, and future transaction activity is likely to accelerate. Who are the players, and where might the available plants be located?
Close to Load, Far From Consensus
Feds seek plug-and-play for distributed generation, but utilities want the power to stay local.
Pity the poor Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. With its market crusade out of favor, and transmission reform suddenly suspect after the Aug. 14 blackout, it could use a new agenda. Indeed, FERC this past July had proposed a new set of standards for the connection of small- and micro-sized power plants units to regional transmission networks, or even to radial or local distribution lines operating at low voltages.
Water Heaters to the Rescue: Demand Bidding in Electric Reserve Markets
With just a few changes in reliability rules, regulators could call on consumer loads to boost power reserves for outages and contingencies.
By accommodating loads with limited storage and deploying resources in a more sophisticated manner, grid operators could expand the range of reliability resources. Consider the electric water heater.