The Top 10 Utility Tech Challenges
Innovation must play a key role in each company.
An EPRI vice president cites areas of concern in each part of the electricity value chain. How can IOUs overcome the formidable difficulties ahead of them?
Environmental Protection Agency
Calling EPACT's Bluff
How Congress opened another can of worms with its call for regional joint boards to study power-plant dispatch.
Did Congress really invite the industry to re-examine the concept of economic dispatch, as practiced by the regional grid operators and RTOs, through market bids, day-ahead markets, a centralized auction, and a uniform market-clearing price? Perhaps not, but skeptics of RTO practice have called the bluff, if that’s what it was.
Wind and the Environment: The EPA's Tech Divide
Does the Clean Air Act require the agency to consider the most low-emission coal plant technologies in permitting new plants?
Why doesn’t its interpretation of the Clean Air Act consider the most low-emission coal plant technologies?
Warming to the Crisis
Kyoto countries miss their targets, but scientists say climate change was already unstoppable.
Hollywood and the media are way ahead of the politicians when it comes to the greenhouse effect and global warming. But even as utilities try to be good corporate citizens and help devise a federal or national plan, the question remains as to whether the domestic economy can achieve even a modest reduction in CO2 releases—enough to put even a small dent in current predictions of global climate change.
Clearing the Air On Emissions
How utilities can take a portfolio-management approach to environmental compliance.
In March 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the final Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) and Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR). Assessing the impact that these and other environmental policies have on the whole organization reveals implications for the corporate process at all levels.
Power-Plant Cooling: How Many Fish Per kWh?
EPA flounders on the Clean Water rule, while producers tackle the real enemy—shortage.
The U.S. EPA says that a typical sport fisherman working the Great Lakes would pay $4.58 for the privilege of catching a single walleye/pike, but would gladly fork over $7.99 to land a trout, or as much as $11.19 for a salmon. Sound fishy? Yet the EPA would rely heavily on these data, and other figures quite similar, to justify its proposed “Phase III” rule to regulate cooling water intake structures at small power plants and other similarly sized facilities, to preserve aquatic and marine life in the nation’s lakes, rivers, streams, bays, and estuaries.
EPA's Big Bet on Green Trading
Environmental Emissions: The cost to power markets of the Clean Air Interstate Rule depends on the ability to trade mercury.
The decision to limit mercury provides cover for utilities reluctant to spend on controlling NOx and SO2, while boosting other companies
Mercury: Much Ado About Nothing?
How the Clean Air Mercury Rule will affect coal prices.
The Clean Air Mercury Rule impacts new and existing coal-fired electric generating plants through a market-based cap-and-trade program similar to the EPA’s highly successful Acid Rain Program. The first phase of the program in 2010 reduces mercury emissions to 38 tons. The second phase goes into action in 2018 with a final mercury emissions cap of 15 tons. The key question is: what extent will the new rule reduce coal’s dominance in the electric generation market?
The EPA Speaks Out: The Clean Air Interstate Rule Explained
The Environmental Protection Agency reviews how the multi-pollutant control concept is to work.
Currently, 132 areas do not meet the new National Ambient Air Quality Standards for fine particles or ozone, affecting some 160 million people, or 57 percent of the U.S. population. What efforts are under way by the EPA to bring these areas into compliance?
Guns, Butter, or Green?
Utilities will face stark tradeoffs in meeting the next round of emissions controls.
Some utility execs gasp at the shear breadth of environmental proposals being bandied about during the past few weeks. Even the environmentalists are calling "historical" the extent to which different kinds of emissions will be regulated.