Frontlines

Federalism At Work

 

 

Excerpts from the field hearing conducted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on wholesale power markets in California.

San Diego, California, Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2000, 9 a.m.

 

The problems stem from a lack of incentives for long-term, fixed-price contracts.

The end of summer found energy regulators working overtime in California to appease an angry public that had seen electric bills double and triple in some parts of the state.

 

The data is in. Market power fails as an explanatory variable for episodes of high prices.

The past summer represented a key turning point in our understanding of deregulated wholesale power markets. Until then, it was possible to find major North American markets that lacked any experience with severe price spikes. Now that immunity is denied. Price spikes in California and other Western markets mean that the last regions bucking the trend have fallen in line.

 

e-Commerce is consolidating, but there's room for the little guys too.

Thomas Edison built the electric utility industry virtually from scratch out of his workshop, so can Internet mavericks do the same for e-commerce? Or has the moment passed for the garage startups, leaving it to the big utilities—or better yet, the large conglomerates and multi-company joint ventures—to attract capital and introduce the new ideas?

News Digest

 

State PUCs

Restructuring Plans. The Ohio PUC denied rehearing of its restructuring order for FirstEnergy issued two months earlier, rejecting arguments by all petitioners-utility, marketers, and consumer watchdog groups.

Frontlines

Engineers Have Their Day

 

1 Some utilities may question this concept. San Diego Gas & Electric argued in California's DG investigation that distributed generation does not always lead to a reduction in distribution plant investment, and that any investment savings is not kilowatt for kilowatt. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken a more extreme position, allowing a utility to charge a fee for distributed generators delivering electricity into the distribution grid.

 

News Analysis

 

 

According to the solar industry, a U.S. appeals court decision—and a Southern California Edison petition pending at the FERC—might put them out of business.

"If Edison were to prevail in this, it would have hugely negative implications for the solar operators."