EEI's contract is ready to go for physical trades of electricity, but the architects say it's likely too late to make a difference this summer.

News Digest

New technologies cloud the future for the traditional electric utility, but offer hope to the gas industry in boosting residential demand.

Investors apparently were paying attention in January when a Web-based analyst predicted Plug Power's stocks could gain 10,000 percent or more by 2010. Before month's end, the fuel cell manufacturer, which doesn't expect to turn a profit before 2004, saw a ninefold increase from the $16 closing day share price at its October initial public offering. That month Avista Corp.

STATE PUCS

Distributed Generation. In December and January the Illinois commission took comments from utilities, marketers, manufacturers, and trade and advocacy groups on how to develop policy on distributed generation.

* Rulemaking Strategy. Enron has urged the state to proceed in a fashion similar to the California PUC's

two-track investigation. It asked for two separate rulemakings on (1) interconnection standards for DG installations of 50 megawatts or less, and (2) rate design and operational issues.

* Unit Size Limits.

The top traders, investors and managers tell why energy convergence is still a pipe dream.

[Graphic tables included in the print version of the Fortnightly are not included in this electronic version.]

Energy investors seemed less willing in 1999 to greet electric/gas combination mergers with the kind of blind enthusiasm they tended to show in prior years.

Instead, they now demand proof that energy convergence really does create tangible value beyond the mere sum of the parts. At least that's the impression gained from talking with John W.

Utilities and marketers hash out the final details on a standardized contract for physical trades of electricity.

A standardized master contract for U.S. power trading could help wring order out of chaos in electric commodities markets by defining a common set of terms for physical transactions for both utilities and marketers, say experts.

But success likely will hinge on how well utilities and marketers can compromise on a narrow list of issues still to be settled, say those same experts.

Consultant blasts national effort, says standards themselves are the problem.

Concerted efforts by utilities, retail marketers and metering companies to establish uniform business practices by implementing national electronic data interchange standards, or EDI, as part of retail competition, are being undermined by the EDI standard itself, says Doug Houseman, director at Cap Gemini Hagler Bailly.

"It is a very big, nasty, complicated monster. There are a lot of people that do not know what they are doing," he says.

News Digest was compiled by Carl J. Levesque, editorial assistant, Lori A. Burkhart, contributing legal editor, and Bruce W. Radford, editor. For continual news updates, see www.pur.com.Nuclear Power

Transmission & ISOs

Transco Independence. Granting Entergy's request for a declaratory order, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled in a case of first impression that a stand-alone transmission company ("transco") would meet the test in Order 888 for independent system operators despite passive ownership by a power producer or other market participant.