Law & Lawyers

Sonoma Clean Power will build the largest floating solar array in the U.S., scheduled to be completed in 2016 and will create enough energy to power 3,000 houses; GE announced the construction of two service centers focused on the operation and maintenance of wind turbines in Brazil; Open Systems International was awarded a contract by Seattle City Light to implement a new energy management system; FirstEnergy expects to invest about $225 million on distribution and transmission infrastructure projects in north-central West Virginia; APR Energy commissioned an expansion of its power plant in Myanmar; The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Westinghouse Electric’s testing approach for the Westinghouse small modular reactor design; FuelCell Energy agreed to sell a 1.4-MW fuel cell power plant project to NRG Energy; ABB and Samsung SDI signed a memorandum of understanding to promote microgrid solutions globally; And others ...

Tesla’s Elon Musk is driving the electric car off the lot and onto the premises of America’s electric utilities, proposing to build and sell energy storage batteries on both a residential and grid-wide scale – ideas that the chief executive will fully flesh out at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in New Orleans this June.

Andrew L. Ott will be PJM Interconnection’s president and CEO later this year; American Transmission Co. named Mike Rowe the company’s future president and CEO; DTE Energy named Paula Silver as v.p. for corporate communications; Georgia Power named Craig Barrs executive v.p. of the company’s customer service and operations organization; ITC Holdings promoted Christine Mason Soneral to senior v.p.; E.ON Energy Services named Keith Day president; Gil C. Quini­ones was elected chair of EPRI; Jane Palmieri was elected industry co-chair at the Alliance to Save Energy; Rich Meyer was named president of the nation’s Energy Bar Association; and others.

Cost-conscious commercial and industrial customers may be oblivious to the legal issues surrounding their energy choices, but their demand response providers are not. The U.S. Supreme Court will now decide whether those services will be regulated by the federal government or state utility commissions.