Perspective

An industry advocate touts the recent rise of projects in the pipeline and forsees remarkable growth in wind farms over the next twenty years — more, perhaps, than others would concede.

A local utility exec admits that Maryland has no truly competitive power market, but claims customer choice is still a good thing.

The EIA also wants to collect data — finances, operations, emissions, fuel consumption and costs — from non-utility generators. What’s the public interest here?

The EIA predicts that natural gas consumption will climb more than 60 percent percent over 20 years, driving U.S. production up 50-plus percent over the same period. How does that square with geologic assessments?

Many public voices today want the government to simply mandate lower energy prices. It is this kind of temper-tantrum-as-policy that makes the Middle Ages seem so, well, medieval, and reminds us why we got rid of kings in the first place.

A letter to Michael J. Manning at Fulbright & Jaworski, L.L.P. from FERC General Counsel Kevin P. Madden.

The analysis shows how one could expect allowed return on equity to change as interest rates change and the resulting financial effect on endusers. The positive side of this thought process is that a continuing low interest rate environment should attenuate the effect of high commodity prices for retail users of electricity.

In addition to increasing total U.S. gas consumption to 34.7 Tcf in 2020, it would take another 11.3 Tcf/year to convert existing coal-fired U.S. steam-electric capacity to gas-fired combined-cycle units operating at the same load factor. Clearly, that is a tall order. Nevertheless, we must face the fact that there are few alternatives other than backing out coal-fired generation that would reduce global carbon emissions to a total of less than 870-990 million metric tons between 1991 and 2100. The logical endpoint will be electrification of most stationary energy uses with high-tech renewable or essentially inexhaustible energy sources, and the use of hydrogen from non-fossil-fuel sources as the dominant transportation fuel.

Two readers — President and CEO of El Paso Electric James Haines and Richard D. Cudahy, Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Chicago — respond to a letter written about Cudahy's article “The Stranded Ratepayer” (March 15, 2001, p. 26).

Restructuring has already created a badly needed new atmosphere for the industry. There is an infusion of new thinking and vigor that portends bringing the industry's performance up to the standards of the rest of the economy. We have no reason to believe that regulation would fare better in the future than in the past. Let's go forward with electric restructuring. Unfortunately, however, it's turning out to be more difficult than we expected.