Law & Lawyers
People
CMS Electric & Gas Co. named Frank Johnson vice president of international electric and gas distribution. He previously was the company's vice president of energy distribution.
J. Kay Smith was appointed vice president of corporate communications and public policy at Ameren Corp. Smith was promoted from assistant to the president for AmerenCIPS and manager of government affairs for Ameren Services.
Duke Energy International appointed David Weaver executive vice president for Europe.
Frontlines
MIT professor Paul Joskow asks the FERC how its rulemaking will help consumers.
By Aug. 23, the electric industry had filed over 150 separate comments - nearly 4,000 pages - telling the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission what it thinks about regional transmission organizations.
All other stories pale in comparison. The commission's proposed rulemaking on RTOs would reinvent the electric transmission business. The case gives economists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to instruct a government agency how to design and build a market from the ground up.
Power Markets Disconnected? How to Reconcile Retail with Wholesale
Shopping credits, capacity rules and other mistakes from California and PJM.
With retail electric markets opening rapidly, why are so many getting off to a slow start? Why do suppliers abandon some markets and consumers decline to participate in others? The answer may lie in a series of disconnections between wholesale trading patterns and retail opportunities.
The Internet: Tomorrow's Solution Today
Let customers choose their own billing format.
The information-management and transaction-cost problems facing deregulated markets are familiar to me. They describe precisely the same barriers I was trying to overcome when I founded Utility.com Inc., an entirely Internet-based energy service provider.
The Internet offers an especially powerful tool for customer service. With deregulation, customers face an enormous learning curve. Not only can they now choose their electric company, but they also must become familiar with new terminology and concepts.
Information Architecture: Building the Right Foundation for Customer Choice in Energy
The crazy quilt emerging in restructured markets only impedes competition.
The enthusiasm among energy retailers has become infectious. It grows as each successive state opens its market to competition. Yet behind the promise lies a grim reality.
Retailers struggle against a tide of thin margins, high customer-acquisition costs, inconsistent rules and regulatory prescriptions for the unregulated market. With all the rulemakings and workshops, the dollars budgeted by utilities to implement retail choice rise above even the level of spending to eradicate the Y2K millennium bug.
The EDI Solution: Help of Hindrance in Billing and Metering?
Consultant blasts national effort, says standards themselves are the problem.
Concerted efforts by utilities, retail marketers and metering companies to establish uniform business practices by implementing national electronic data interchange standards, or EDI, as part of retail competition, are being undermined by the EDI standard itself, says Doug Houseman, director at Cap Gemini Hagler Bailly.
"It is a very big, nasty, complicated monster. There are a lot of people that do not know what they are doing," he says.
Stranded Costs for a "Hungry" Utility
Even the FERC's own lawyers urge a new rule when a customer leaves a utility that already has too little capacity.
In a brief filed Aug. 18, staff counsel Theresa Burns and Diane Schratwieser urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rethink its policy on wholesale stranded costs when a customer threatens to leave but the utility is so short of generating capacity that it can easily make up any lost revenues by reallocating the reserves to other native load customers at prevailing, regulated embedded-cost retail rates.
People
Stephen W. Bergstrom was named president and chief operating officer of Dynegy Inc. Bergstrom formerly was president and COO of Dynegy Marketing and Trade and senior vice president of Dynegy Inc.
Texas-New Mexico Power Co. promoted Robert E. Castillo to vice president and regional customer officer for its Mountain Region. Castillo, formerly assistant vice president-New Mexico, replaces Allan Davis, who retired after 34 years with TNMP.
William W. Schivley was named president of Select Energy, Northeast Utilities System's marketing affiliate.