The Palm Springs City Council has approved a contract with Portland General Corp., the parent company of Portland General Electric, which specifies the roles and responsibilities of both parties as the city establishes a new utility, "City of Palm Springs Energy Services."
Last December, Palm Springs had selected Portland General to become the city's new energy services partner to help it develop a municipal utility to compete in a deregulated marketplace.
A new report found advances in distributed electric generation, noting a pronounced shift since the early 1990s toward on-site generation, as electronic control systems now allow for remote dispatching, and combustion turbine engines are smaller, more powerful and offer increased energy efficiency.
North American Distributed Generation System Markets, produced by Frost & Sullivan, said that the Clean Air Act of 1972, and subsequent amendments made over the last 25 years, have influenced technologies.
Public Service Electric & Gas Co. has asked the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to impose mandatory environmental disclosure requirements on all power providers who wish to compete in the state's market.
Specifically, the utility wants an environmental consumer protection standard requiring all sellers planning to compete in New Jersey periodically to disclose their system-wide emission rates or that of the source from which power is produced.
Arizona Public Service Co. has filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of Maricopa County to challenge rules adopted by the Arizona Corporation Commission in December 1996 to open the state's electric industry to competition over a four-year period starting in 1999.
Investor-owned utilities in Pennsylvania have filed their retail electric competition plans with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to comply with recent legislation requiring customer-choice pilots for 5 percent of the peak load of the state's electric utilities.
PECO Energy Co. has filed a proposed electric choice retail pilot program that would allow about 90,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers to choose their electric suppliers as soon as October and no later than January 1998.
The New York Public Service Commission has adopted eligibility criteria rules for competitive retail energy services companies (ESCOs) seeking to sell electricity in the state.
The state created the March 5 ESCO rules as part of New York's "Competitive Opportunities" proceeding. The rules are consistent with the PSC's May 16, 1996 decision to open markets to wholesale competition in 1997 and to retail competition in 1998. Consumer protections used in the present monopoly environment will be retained during the transition to competition.
Stone & Webster will lead a consortia building a $109 million geothermal power plant for Amoseas Indonesia, Inc. The project calls for a second and third unit at the Darajat geothermal station, which taps into geothermal fields in the Garut Regency of West Java, Indonesia. Each unit has a capacity of 70 MW. The entire project was set to be finished by early 2000. Stone & Webster's portion of the contract is worth about $40 million.
Westinghouse Electric Corp. contracted to supply a barge-mounted power plant for the Port of Mombassa Power Barge Project in Malaysia.
According to a new study we have conducted at Resource Data International, the continuing transformation from a regulated industry to a fully competitive industry will create substantial opportunities for new generating companies. With the implementation of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 and the FERC's Orders 888 and 889, competition has been introduced into wholesale power markets. It is limited in scope, however, as utilities are still able to recover their fixed generation costs and embedded cost of capital from their captive retail markets.
Why We Sign Those Secret Deals
Out here in the trenches, Professor William Shepherd's attempts to correlate anti-competitive pricing strategies with market dominance will take a while to sink in, mostly because the politics seem to get in the way of clear thinking. While his article ("Anti-Competitive Impacts of Secret Strategic Pricing in the Electricity Industry," Feb. 15, 1997, p.
John Yurkanin was appointed senior v.p. of marketing and sales for LG&E Natural. Yurkanin joined LG&E in 1996 and served as senior v.p., producer services. Yurkanin will direct LG&E in expanding marketing presence with utilities and other marketers. Also at LG&E, Mark Stanger was appointed v.p., producer services. Stanger will direct service business, including contracting for new sources of gas supply and managing relationships with current suppliers.
Commissioner Hullihen Williams Moore will serve as chairman of the State Corporation Commission for the next year.