The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners has elected Susan F. Clark, commissioner of the Florida Public Service Commission, as its representative on the North American Electric Reliability Council. Clark has served as Florida's commissioner since 1991. Commissioner of the North Carolina Utilities Commission, Allyson K. Duncan, also was elected to serve as a NARUC representative. Duncan will represent NARUC on the advisory council to the board of directors of EPRI.

Tony A. Prophet, former new business development v.p.

The PJM Interconnection is what they call a "tight" power pool. As the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has explained, tight power pools "extensively coordinate" their planning and operations, with central dispatch of generating plants. This coordination builds reliability--one of the long-term benefits, says the FERC, of a tight power pool.

Coordination also builds market power, however. And, as we all know from FERC Order 888, market power in transmission stands as "the single greatest impediment" to electricity competition.

The overwhelming impression is one of growth (em in volume and in the number of participants.

The early 1990s was an anxious period for advocates of emissions trading. Concerns about whether the sulfur dioxide allowance market would ever develop tempered the heady success of the first national emissions trading program implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, Title IV. These concerns were heightened when in May 1992, Wisconsin Power & Light traded 10,000 allowances to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Appearing as tree huggers, utilities draw skeptical reaction from environmentalists.

At first glance, it looks like the same old story: Environmentalists versus utilities. But this time, the utilities are the ones fighting for the forests (em with a twist.

Utilities, major producers of carbon dioxide, believe they've found a cost-effective way to offset emissions through carbon sequestration, or sinks, which means converting pastures to forests or maintaining old-growth groves.

But environmentalists call it an easy way out.

OTAG Makes Recommendations to EPA

Does cleaner air mean lighter pockets?

The Ozone Transport Advisory Group has recommended that the EPA should let states adopt a range of emissions levels to help meet ozone standards, which could tap into utilities' profits. The proposal comes two years after OTAG was formed to study region-to-region airborne movements of smog, a byproduct of ozone.

Coal-fired power plants and vehicle exhaust are the biggest contributors to ozone, due to emissions of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds.

U.S., rest of the world ponder CO2 emissions, with utilities caught in the middle.

Four months from now, in Kyoto, Japan, international policy negotiators will decide how quickly to curtail carbon dioxide emissions and allay the world's fears of melting ice caps and rising temperatures.

The amendments to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or FCCC, are likely to be founded more on world and domestic politics than on science. Industry climatologists, after all, insist the atmosphere is not warming as fast as others predict, and could be, in fact, cooling.

Minnesota has lots of drafts, but no final plan.

So you think your state has been busy? In Minnesota, the 1997 legislative session saw more than a dozen new bills introduced on electric, gas and energy issues.

At the start of the session many expected that electric deregulation would play a major part in the legislative program. However, Gov. Carlson reports now that legislators will defer work on the issue until the 1998 session. Several electric industry deregulation bills were introduced at the end of the session, but when last we checked no hearings had been held.

Under a new law deregulating the state's natural gas market, the Georgia Public Service Commission must enact regulations by Dec. 31, 1997, governing the certification of gas marketers and associated service quality standards and customer complaint procedures.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has ruled that federal antitrust laws provide no remedy for complaints by a qualifying cogeneration facility that an electric utility was impermissibly curtailing purchases under its power purchase contract with the QF.

It said that Pennsylvania's recently enacted electric restructuring law "comes too late" to make the QF's complaint a valid one.

Schuylkill Energy Resources Inc., owner and operator of an anthracite coal refuse-fired QF in Shenandoah, Pa., had filed an antitrust claim against Pennsylvania Power and Light Co.

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has approved the merger of Interstate Power Co., IES Industries Inc., and WPL Holdings Inc., joining Illinois, which has also signed off on the deal. (See, Headlines, this issue, p. 21.)

The commission estimated total merger-related savings of $592.1 million to $648.1 million over 10 years. Minnesota ratepayers could save nearly $15.5 million in electric costs and $6.4 million in gas over the same period.