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Law & Lawyers

Regulators Can Win the Trifecta with Residential Demand Charges

Advanced metering and demand charges give efficient and equitable price signals to customers.

The wide deployment of smart meters gives regulatory policy-makers a rare opportunity to change residential rate design. This can be done in a way that improves economic efficiency, and utility consumer and shareholder equity. Here we provide ten questions that should be asked by policy-makers, as well as some guidance in deriving the answers.
Byline: 

Ross C. Hemphill and Kenneth W. Costello

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Geomagnetic Disturbances and the Grid

Harmonics Studies Needed to Assess Vulnerabilities

NERC recently issued reliability standards in response to the potential for geomagnetic disturbances to disrupt operations and possibly damage assets. The power industry appears to have placed undue emphasis on GMD’s threat to transformers. Our studies and those by others have underscored the value to transmission organizations in assessing their vulnerability to harmonics.
Byline: 

David Mueller

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Energy Company's Pipe Dream

Why $3.3 Billion Northeast Energy Direct Pipeline Was Defeated

It’s a David and Goliath story. But instead of a slingshot, David in this case fired off a stiff legal challenge to defeat the giant.
Byline: 

Vincent DeVito

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Ratemaking and the Campaign Against Rooftop Solar

Rate design should balance consumer and investor interests.

Regulators should ensure that changes to rate design seek to balance consumer and utility interests. Rates that are intended to insulate utilities from economic and technological change while providing no benefits to consumers ought to be considered unjust, unreasonable, and unduly discriminatory.
Byline: 

Ari Peskoe

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Here Comes the Sun

Growing Impacts of Residential Solar on Utility Customer Service

What does PV mean for utilities’ residential customer service operations? From helping customers with supplier selection, through installation and maintenance issues? And with billing? To begin to address this question, we conducted two sets of surveys of residential electricity customers in the second quarter of 2016.
Byline: 

Daniel Gabaldon, Matt Guarini and Jamie Wimberly

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A Robotic Concrete Crawler

Play Station Controls Guide Robot on Concrete Inspection Trips

EPRI has designed a robot for inspecting hard-to-reach concrete surfaces. A robotic inspection system would eliminate the need to use scaffolding or rappelling for routine structural evaluations, eliminating the associated setup challenges, time requirements, costs, and safety hazards.
Byline: 

Maria Guimaraes

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Preparing for the Inevitable

New Approach to Recovery from Catastrophic Losses of Grid Facilities

How to adequately prepare for recovery from catastrophic losses: Doing nothing may minimize cost in the short run, but it leaves electricity customers exposed to the risk of extended outages. At the other extreme, having each utility purchase its own dedicated inventory of critical equipment would be duplicative and prohibitively expensive for utility customers. A shared inventory model offers a sensible middle-ground approach.
Byline: 

Paul Afonso, Lauren Azar, Dian Grueneich and James Hoecker

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