Frontlines
Meter Men?
Some thoughts on the battle to measure electricity consumption in real time.
How can something so simple as an electric meter bring governments, editors, and the utility industry to their knees?
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.
1 Some utilities may question this concept. San Diego Gas & Electric argued in California's DG investigation that distributed generation does not always lead to a reduction in distribution plant investment, and that any investment savings is not kilowatt for kilowatt. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken a more extreme position, allowing a utility to charge a fee for distributed generators delivering electricity into the distribution grid.
Off Peak
October 15, 2000
Life in the Aughts
Experts predict top 10 energy innovations for 2010.
Before we've even agreed on a name for the coming decade, energy experts are predicting life-altering changes by 2010.
News Digest
State PUCs
Restructuring Plans. The Ohio PUC denied rehearing of its restructuring order for FirstEnergy issued two months earlier, rejecting arguments by all petitioners-utility, marketers, and consumer watchdog groups.
1 Ilic, Zaborszky, "Dynamics and Control of Large Electric Power Systems," John Wiley & Sons, 2000 (800 page text).
2 Ilic, Arce, Yoon, Fumagali, "Assessing Reliability Under Open Access," to be published in The Electricity Journal, December 2000.
3 For more information, please contact the author and/or the MIT Technology Licensing Office, making reference to MIT Case # 9062.
Frontlines
Engineers Have Their Day