From reporting to trading, utilities try to meet new expectations.

On the issue of global climate change, most utilities have devoted their attention to tracking developments in Washington, D.C., following the rising and falling fortunes of legislation that could result in federal greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting or regulatory requirements. For the most part, utilities have taken comfort in the resolutely anti-regulatory stance of the Bush administration on greenhouse gas emissions.

The road to the current reliability crisis is paved with four decades of bad policy decisions.

 

The technical causes of the great Northeast blackout of August 2003 are coming into focus. For reasons yet unknown as of press time, transmission lines in northern Ohio were lost to the grid, and within seconds 50 million people in the United States and Canada were without power. Soon we will no doubt know the specific reasons for the blackout, and technical corrections and improvements will be made.

Dung Deal

Power plants choose that most renewable of fuels.

Power from pig poop. Sounds like a skit from Saturday Night, but it's not. In July, a bona fide dung-fired power plant came online in that most proper of nations, Great Britain. And according to the firm behind the project, Farmatic UK, the plant could be the first of many in Britain.

Dung-fired power plants are also popular in Germany and Denmark, which each has about 20 large-scale plants operating.

1 "Annual Energy Outlook 2001 With Projections to 2020," Energy Information Administration, Document No. DOE/EIA-0383(2001), December 2000.

2 Oil Resources Panel and Commentary by W.L. Fisher et al, "An Assessment of the Oil Resource Base of the United States," U.S. Department of Energy, Bartlesville Project Office, Document No. DOE/BC-93/1/SF (October 1992).

3 Henry R. Linden, "Let's Focus on Sustainability, Not Kyoto," The Electricity Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2, March 1999, pp. 56-67.

 

News Analysis

 

 

News Digest

Former coal lobbyist Glenn Schleede plays Don Quixote, crusading against the DOE's 20-year initiative to boost investment in windmills.

Appliance Efficiency: Does the Fuel Cycle Make a Difference?