Natural Gas Hedging: A Primer for Utilities and Regulators

 

What commissions need to learn.
What LDCs should already know.

The facts are now in. If utilities had hedged their natural gas purchases during the 1990s, they could have earned windfalls for those they serve, given the wild price gyrations of the past decade (). Yet few if any households or businesses saw any windfall, because few utilities were engaged in futures and other derivatives markets.

 

High profit potential will attract new power plants, forcing prices down and stranding the state's long-term electricity purchases.

Let's consider three questions crucial to California's energy crisis and its plans for solution.

Fortnightly

News Analysis

 

Electric Shopping Credits: In Search of an Apples- to-Apples Comparison

 

 

How to replace the bundled utility tariff with a rational design for access, throughput, and congestion.

Et Tu, Mexico?

A consultant questions whether our trade partner's role in organizing cutbacks in world oil production is consistent with NAFTA obligations.

How to justify green power without apologizing for the price.

.Tx

Policymakers have shown considerable interest in the concept of a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), and how it might affect the cost of energy.

The RPS would require electricity providers to include a small amount of renewables-based power - typically less than 3 percent or 4 percent - in their resource mix.

Once trailing, but now the frontrunner, Germany attempts to remake its fragmented energy markets - with no new federal bureaucracy.

Here's a timely recommendation for U.S. electric power executives: Maybe it's time to brush up on those long-forgotten high school German lessons. Suddenly, the German electric power market has become the fastest changing in the world. It all happened in less than the two years passed since Germany enacted a new energy law, which became fully effective on April 28, 1998.