Consensus building is an imperative and educational art form.
With public opposition rising against almost any kind of utility project or investment, collaboration among stakeholders with widely divergent points of view never has been more critical. Three recent utility cases demonstrate how a formal stakeholder collaboration process can build support for otherwise contentious decisions.
Who will oversee the industry’s cyber standards?
Who will oversee the industry’s cyber standards? Effective security calls for a single organization to set standards that will protect the smart grid. The industry is struggling to reach consensus over authority, scope and funding for its new security apparatus.
A clear and present need for nuclear energy expansion.
Addressing climate change will require extending the life of today’s nuclear fleet and laying the foundation for new plants.
Utilities consider imposing a retail surcharge to fund clean-tech R&D.
Utility CEOs debate the merits of a retail surcharge to fund clean-tech R&D.
How reliability performance monitoring and standards compliance will be achieved in real time.
The North American electric power grid has suffered several significant outages in recent years. These events and other incidents around the world spotlight the need for enforceable grid-reliability standards, wide-area visibility of the health of the power system, and real-time monitoring of grid-reliability performance to prevent blackouts. Effective reliability management requires real-time tools and technologies that can detect standards violations so that timely corrective or preventive actions can be taken.
What federal regulators should do to ensure security, reliability, and cleaner air in our nation’s capital.
The District of Columbia Public Service Commission successfully has used two little known provisions in the Federal Power Act (FPA) to prevent an aging generating plant crucial to the national capital region’s reliability from being abruptly shut down by Virginia’s environmental regulators. In the end, the immediate threat to the region’s reliability was obviated while the environmental concerns associated with the plant were not ignored. The action resulted in a model for how federal energy regulators and environmental regulators can address similar problems in the future.
Distributed Generation
In the first of three articles, experts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory examine the technical obstacles, deployment, and economic issues surrounding distributed generation.
The existing electric power delivery system is a critical part of this country's economic and societal infrastructure, and proposals to increase the role of distributed energy resources (DER) within this system are welcomed by few in the utility industry.
The technology works, but public policy will dictate its future.
Business & Money
A spate of proposed U.S. tax rule changes soon may open a window of opportunity for certain utilities.
In the mid-1990s, before the rise of the Internet and the fall of Enron changed the calculus of business investing and the regulatory landscape, the historically staid U.S. utility industry began to be viewed as a "growth play." This triggered a global buying spree that led U.S. companies to invest tens of billions of dollars in electricity generation and distribution businesses all over the world.
Southern Communications Services, Inc., which recently entered the wireless communications market, has begun to market products and services under the name of its parent, Southern Company. Southern also is parent to Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, Mississippi Power, and Savannah Electric.
Gulf Power, meanwhile, signed a contract with Scientific-Atlanta, Inc. for two-way energy management applications. Some 40,000 homes will be fitted with the interactive systems over eight years.