Standard-Offer Service: Beauty or Beast?
Is development of retail choice compatible with best-priced standard-offer service for smaller customers? Conflicting policy priorities threaten to distort Maryland’s retail energy markets.
Natural gas
The Late Great Gas Utility
By abandoning R&D and marketing, the gas industry may have sealed its own fate.
Gas producers and utilities have all but abandoned R&D and marketing. Is it too late to reverse the death spiral, or can the industry learn from other check-off marketing successes?
The High Cost of Restructuring
RTO markets aren’t living up to the promise of cheaper power.
Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) have not performed as well as open wholesale markets over the past decade. RTO advocates want governmental intervention, but the best answer may be requiring RTOs to file system lambdas.
Post-Meltdown Valuation
Credit-quality concerns join fuel and market factors to affect power-plant valuation
Lenders know there are billions of dollars of weak financial assets in the market, such as securities backed by bad mortgages. The problem is no one knows who is exposed at what level to those weak financial assets. This causes a lack of confidence in the lending industry, and a credit crunch that — if unabated — could cause a recession.
Walking the Walk
Eco-Developer Pat Wood III explains how competitive markets are good for green business.
The debate over implementing comprehensive electric-competition policies throughout the U.S. economy still rages to this day. Pat Wood III, as the federal regulator, had to fight many tough, public battles in defense of his beliefs on open markets. But there is no bitterness from those battles, if there ever was. It’s quite the opposite. Interviewed at the American Wind Energy Association conference in early June, Wood punctuated his answers in the go get ’em, optimistic view of the world many remember him for at FERC.
Carbon Costs: The Coming Battle
Where are prices going, and where have they been?
The Supreme Court’s recent decision empowering the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide shifted momentum toward a mandatory program to cap greenhouse-gas emissions. Eventually, there will be huge implications for power generation.
The New Balance of Power
Do states have any rights in siting LNG terminals?
Natural gas often is called the world’s most perfect fuel. And since it can be transported as liquefied natural gas (LNG), and, as LNG, is projected to meet 20 percent of the country’s natural-gas requirements by 2025, the construction of onshore LNG terminals is crucial for the United States. Siting of LNG terminals is contentious as states and a range of stakeholders challenge and seek to frustrate FERC’s permitting authority.
Squeezing BTUs From Light Bulbs
Incandescent light bulbs create a cogeneration benefit by warming the indoor spaces they illuminate.
Genuine price signals about the underlying cost of consumer energy usage are an important part of energy efficiency. With those signals, consumers can adapt to save high-cost energy, while making better use of available low-cost sources and supplies.
The Gas Executives Forum: Gas Pains
Commodity price upheavals are energizing gas utilities to evolve their business models.
Top officials at several U.S. retail gas companies reveal how they are rethinking their business models and developing new approaches to serve customers in the face of supply concerns and price volatilities.
Energy Hedge Funds: Market Makers or Market Breakers?
Should utilities and consumers be concerned about these obscure investment groups?
The total hedge-fund universe currently approaches $1.1 trillion, about 5 percent of which is dedicated exclusively to energy. These numbers for energy hedge funds are likely to grow at unprecedented rates. How can your company benefit?
“Mysterium tremendum et fascinans”: The Latin phrase, coined by German theologian Rudolf Otto, which characterizes humans as being overwhelmed and fascinated by experiences that are totally different from ordinary life.1