New York Takes the Lead
No proposal is as radical – or as well thought out – as REV.
If the New York Rev is fully implemented, utility earnings would depend more on creating value for customers and achieving policy objectives.
Audrey Zibelman
Microgrids: Friend or Foe for Utilities?
For many, it’s the next logical step for smart grid technology.
A small, but growing, number of utilities are embracing these technologies. Microgrids offer a networking platform that the utility can both aggregate and optimize.
New York's Natural Gas Path
The state is diverging from the national trend.
New York is taking its own path and outlawing the use of high-volume natural gas fracking. Yet, the state will remain a voracious consumer of natural gas that is fracked elsewhere. What gives?
2014 Utility Regulators' Forum
Diversifying Utility Regulation: State regulators voice opinions as mixed as the nation’s geography.
Interviews with public utility commissioners from key states – New York, California, Maryland, and Georgia – on coal carbon, climate, and the revolution in retail. What they’re thinking. What they’re planning.
Reinventing the Grid
How to find a future that works.
The traditional central-station grid is evolving toward a more distributed architecture, accommodating a variety of resources spread out across the network. An open and thoughtful planning approach will allow an orderly transition to an integrated system – while fostering innovation among a wider range of industry players.
Yes, We Have No Negawatts
When you sell demand response back to the grid, how much capacity are you now not buying?
When customers sell demand response into a regional capacity market (such as PJM’s Reliability Pricing Model, known as the RPM), how much credit should they earn for agreeing to curtail demand and alleviating stress on the grid — that is, for reducing the market’s need for generating capability and capacity reserve margin? And further, should the amount of credit depend on whether the customer works with market aggregators, known both as CSPs (“Curtailment Service Providers”) or ARCs (“Aggregators of Retail Customers”)? One view would pay customers for the full extent of their curtailment of demand — known as its “Guaranteed Load Drop” (GLD). The other would limit capacity credit to the customer’s prior load history — “Peak Load Contribution,” or PLC. The answer may well dictate whether regulators continue to treat “energy” and “capacity” as two distinct concepts.
One if by Wholesale, Two if by Retail
Which path leads to the smart grid?
A fierce debate has erupted in the utility policy community, with battle lines drawn within FERC itself. In the effort to improve system efficiency, two competing alternatives stand out: to build the smart grid on large-scale demand response (DR) programs, or to build it around consumer behavior in retail markets.
Long-Term Transmission Rights: A High-Stakes Debate
The absence of long-term transmission rights could exclude potential competition—and cause higher electricity costs.
Power-industry restructuring redistributed financial uncertainties that discourage generation investment and ultimately raise the price of electricity to consumers.
People
New Opportunities:
People
New Opportunities:
Duke Energy made several changes to its executive leadership. Dick Blackburn said he would retire as the company's executive vice president, general counsel, and chief administrative officer. He had been with the company since 1997. Duke also named Bill Easter chairman, president, and CEO of Duke Energy Field Services, replacing Jim Mogg, who moves up to group vice president and chief development officer for Duke Energy.
Commission Watch
The case for participant-funded transmission.
Planned or Private?