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 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 .
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.
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.
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Engineers Have Their Day
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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.