DSM: Don’t Stop Maximizing
Useful analytics to improve program performance.
Turning interval meter data into analytics to improve program performance for demand-side management.
Law & Lawyers
Nuclear Policy Half-Life
Interim steps toward solving America’s spent-fuel dilemma.
New legislation could clear the path toward a sustainable strategy for storing spent nuclear fuel. Complexities and disagreements, however, might scuttle the effort.
Digest
Duke Energy Renewables begins construction on 5-MW solar project in North Carolina; Duke and Integrys partner with Canadian Solar and Community Energy Solar on 3-MW PV project; First Wind contracts for 333 MW in Massachusetts; EDF Renewable Energy buys into 20-MW anaerobic digester plant; AEP to retire Tanners Creek 4 coal plant; Opelika Power Services selects Tantalus for fiber-based triple-play system; ABB wins substation contract in Brazil and commissions offshore wind transmission link in Europe; Arista Power to develop microgrid system for U.S. Army facility; plus announcements and contracts from Standard Solar, ComEd, British Gas, Tenaska, and others.
Predictive Analytic Solutions: Beyond the Hype
Don’t confuse hype with your organization’s capability to implement innovative solutions and realize a positive rate of return on your investment.
SPONSORED WHITE PAPER: The ability to achieve higher grid performance and greater customer engagement while at the same time protecting the immense amount of data generated from today’s monitoring, control, and transactional energy operations requires new ways of doing business and revamped analytical solutions. Plenty of people will tell you what those solutions are. But don’t confuse the hype—and there is a lot of it—with your organization’s capability to implement innovative solutions and realize a positive rate of return on your investment (ROI). If you do, you will end up floundering or, at best, making piecemeal progress.
Productivity Plateau
A mature industry faces a worrying round of hype.
Are we languishing, or working off a 20th-century legacy? Gartner’s hype cycle suggests the latter, as new technologies start producing value.
Are Competitive Solicitations Actually Competitive?
Bidding, transparency, and foregone conclusions in Big Sky Country.
PURPA wars are heating up again, and self-dealing conflicts are re-emerging. A Montana commissioner identifies weaknesses in supply procurement processes.
What Solar Success Looks Like
Managing the transition to a solar-powered future.
Solar energy has a bright future as part of America’s electric power industry. An orderly and beneficial transition will depend on strategic action.
Tranche Warfare
The experts do battle over capacity market design.
A FERC conference this fall aired new major policy options for capacity markets. Amid the battle, ISOs are making tactical adjustments.
Partnership, Not Preemption
How state-sponsored planning can fit with FERC’s capacity markets.
FERC-approved capacity markets and state-sponsored resource planning serve different needs. The one shouldn’t pre-empt the other.
Category Error
The trouble with treating grid projects as market players in New York’s capacity auction.
Transmission is not generation. Yet New York ISO makes grid projects qualify as competitive, like gen plants, to get to play in its capacity market.