Off Peak
September 15, 2000
The Big Letdown
Payoffs don't stack up to the work involved in switching suppliers, say businesses.
Switching electric suppliers appears to make for disappointed business customers.
Frontlines
Pancakes for Breakfast?
Two new transcos wake up to a stack of protests.
With the first deadline only a month away, electric utilities have launched trial balloons before filing plans at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for regional transmission organizations (RTOs).
San Diego Gas & Electric turns vendor heads with its plan to install real-time meters, but the company could face heat from regulators.
This is a landmark event," says Bill Rush, a physicist at the Gas Technology Institute, and a gas industry expert on electric utility metering systems.
News Analysis
According to the solar industry, a U.S. appeals court decisionand a Southern California Edison petition pending at the FERCmight put them out of business.
"If Edison were to prevail in this, it would have hugely negative implications for the solar operators."
1 Worse, new institutions such as the California ISO seem to believe falsely that their actions will not have serious spillover effects outside their immediate jurisdictional concerns. Electric utilities in neighboring states know that they indeed are affected by Cal-ISO pricing policy and terms of service.
2 .
Off Peak
October 1, 2000
Dereg Dilemma
Why do U.S. electric bills continue to climb, when other liberalized Western countries are seeing reductions?
Electric deregulation in the United States isn't slashing consumer bills the way it has in other countries. Despite continuing restructuring, the price of U.S. electricity ranked second-highest in an April survey of 14 major Western economies.