market

Market Manipulation: The Business Questions

Ten points to remember for compliance and employee training.

Without a clear definition of market manipulation, or a detailed description for prohibited conduct, market participants are often left with more questions than answers.

Enron's Lessons

Are regulators managing market manipulation?

Some will stray from ethical behavior. But markets must be regulated to maintain confidence.

PJM's Three-Way Proposal

A re-defined capacity product, revised parameters for generator performance, and a new role for demand response.

The proposal creates a new capacity product called the “Capacity Performance Resource.”

Playing Safe with Capacity Markets

PJM would minimize risk, but so did regulation.

Changes envisioned by PJM call for ever more structured markets, further reducing the scope of the competitive landscape from which RTOs arose. They may produce a system that is actually more costly and less innovative than regulation.

Finding Common Ground on Energy Efficiency

Policy recommendations for utilities and regulators.

It’s the downright cheapest way of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Yet it’s mired from state to state in battles over definitions, principles, and parameters. Herein a collection of recommended policy positions to break the impasse over energy efficiency.

Rooftop Parity

Solar for Everyone, including Utilities

An independent system operator for the distribution network could open more opportunities for distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar.

A Call for Consolidation

Electric utility mergers loom as the next step in restructuring.

The electric utility industry is inefficient: the firms are too small, lacking economies of scale achievable through mergers and acquisitions.

Enforcement Times Two

FERC and CFTC begin sharing information to target market manipulation in the energy industry.

Closer coordination between FERC and CFTC (and perhaps also with DOJ) will increase enforcement risk for energy industry traders.

Wind Power Subsidies

Today, tomorrow, forever?

NREL contradicts AWEA, finds wind power not competitive, and favors extending the production tax credit (PTC), but that won’t aid economic growth.

Life in the Transco Age

The competitive transmission genie is out of the bottle.

FERC Orders 890 and 1000 have opened the doors to independent transcos, heralding an era of innovation to solve reliability and capacity problems.