Almost 40 percent of utility workers will become eligible for retirement in the next five years. Assuming only nominal growth, the industry by 2010 will need to hire 10,000 new skilled workers each year. Exacerbating this situation is a host of social and market factors that constrain the supply of skilled workers and make the workforce gap especially challenging for electric and gas utilities.

The stars would seem to be aligned for a renaissance of nuclear power in the United States. Fossil-fuel prices are historically high, political uncertainty plagues the Middle East, Russia, and other oil-producing regions, new reactor technology looks promising, and President Bush is promoting nuclear among the alternatives for electric power. Indeed, opinion polls suggest the public has an increasingly positive attitude towards nuclear power.

When FERC opened wholesale power markets to competition a decade ago in Order No. 888, it codified a system for awarding grid access known as the pro forma Open-Access Transmission Tariff (OATT), founded on physical rights, and on the fiction that electrons travel along a “contract path.” Should the commission “tinker” with the OATT, making only surgical changes to make it current? Or, do events instead warrant a complete overhaul?

After four years of legislative trench warfare, contentious legal wrangling, and heated partisan rhetoric, President Bush finally got what he wanted—a really big energy bill. What he did not get, however, was an internally consistent "national energy strategy." Examination of the legislation reveals that its title—the Energy Policy Act of 2005—is less descriptive than the title popularized by Sen. John McCain: the No Lobbyist Left Behind Act of 2005.

Exelon appointed Tom Ridge and Dr. William C. Richardson to its board of directors. NiSource Inc. has restructured its leadership team. Hydro-Québec appointed André Caillé chairman of its board of directors and Thierry Vandal as president and CEO of the company. Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) Chairman Wendell F. Holland recently was named president of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners. And others...

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

Robert Blohm's article, "Solving the Crisis in Unscheduled Power," () ignores a significant part of the power-scheduling paradigm-that is, it ignores transmission. Every power schedule not only includes load and generation but also a path to move the electricity between those points.

Voltage Regulation

Reactive power is the key to an efficient and reliable grid.

People

New Opportunities:

Stephan T. Haynes, who has been American Electric Power's vice president of risk oversight since January 2002, was named vice president of corporate finance for the company.

Kay G. Priestly was named Entergy Corp.'s vice president of financial issues management. Priestly earlier was managing partner at Arthur Andersen.

Like it or not, changes are coming for electric cooperatives. Fewer and bigger might be the inevitable result.

When power planners at Basin Electric Power Cooperative began trying to decide how and where the company's next big power plant would be built, they did what a co-op does best -they reached out and formed a coalition.