Is DER competitive with traditional utility investments, and if so, what are the costs and benefits?
Utilities must make hard tradeoffs regarding which distribution investments offer the greatest value. How should they quantify DER as integrated into the grid?
Why the standard market design refuses to die.
Hold on to your hats. The vaunted and vilified “standard market design”, once thought dead and buried, has been resuscitated, with all attendant chaos and rhetoric, but this time in the guise of a new proposal under the code name “open dispatch.” This new construct, as remarkable in its way as Einstein’s theory of indeterminate space and time, declares that electric transmission, long seen as one of a triumvirate of unique and essential utility industry sectors (along with generation and distribution), is little more than a mirage.
How online monitoring can prevent costly failures.
The march of technology, the urgent call for greater grid investment, and a painful recent past have caught up with the utilities industry. One key area of preventative maintenance for utilities is the transformer, many of which are decades old. Representing approximately $200 billion in investment, these units—which currently number approximately 100,000—can’t be replaced overnight.
The resource overbuild in the West complicates the company’s efforts.
Calpine’s announcement that it will shed 20 of its 92 power plants, close three offices, and lay off 775 more staff in a bid to emerge from bankruptcy caused by more than $22 billion in total debt was not unexpected. The question is whether these actions will be sufficient to get the job done.
Cal-ISO files a new market design, but has it traded efficiency for software?
Eyeing a launch date of November 2007, Cal-ISO at last has come forward with plans for revamping its widely disparaged wholesale market design. The formal proposal, known as the MRTU (Market Redesign and Technology Upgrade), was filed this past February at FERC.
Banks are reshaping the energy-trading landscape. When the dust settles, utility companies will face different strategic horizons.
Utility executives face volatile energy markets, skyrocketing fuel prices, and changing federal energy policies. How are utilities benefiting from the turnaround in energy trading?
FERC says it won’t ‘change’ the native-load preference, but don’t bet on it.
When FERC opened wholesale power markets to competition a decade ago in Order No. 888, it codified a system for awarding grid access known as the pro forma Open-Access Transmission Tariff (OATT), founded on physical rights, and on the fiction that electrons travel along a “contract path.” Should the commission “tinker” with the OATT, making only surgical changes to make it current? Or, do events instead warrant a complete overhaul?
New federal policies portend a wave of demand-response programs, and perhaps a new era in resource planning.
When President Bush signed the energy bill on August 8, he set in motion a chain of events that might lead to major changes in the way utilities price and meter retail electric services—and ultimately in the way they value and use non-traditional energy resources.
Many of the obstacles and strategic issues that utilities face today are all too familiar. This time they must be solved with a different business model.
Several hurdles remain to further liberalization and full competition in the electricity sector.