Renewable energy is booming in California, but many project developers must race the clock to break ground by year’s end, or risk losing federal stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA),  in the form of cash grants from the U.S. Treasury totaling up to 30 percent of total project costs.

So if you’re a California solar or wind developer, and you want to safeguard your stimulus cash, you bring in the big guns. You call in The Terminator — none other than California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger – who wrote to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Jon Wellinghoff in mid-October on behalf of more than a half-dozen developers, asking FERC’s assistance in getting transmission line hookups OK’d by CAISO, the California Independent System Operator, which oversees much of California’s power grid.  The developers would need these grid interconnections to secure funding, finalize contracts, purchase materials, and otherwise get their ducks in a row for the December 31st ARRA deadline.

But then a funny thing happened. Roughtly 10 days of receiving the Governor’s letter, FERC issued two groundbreaking decisions that alter current policy and will make it far easier for wind and solar developers to secure those coveted grid hookups.

Was it Arnold’s doing? We’ll never know. But maybe now we should start calling him The Stimulator. Read more »

Posted: December 9th, 2010 under California, Electric Utility Regulation, FERC, Generator Interconnections, Reliability, Renewable Energy, Solar Energy, Transmission Planning, Transmission Rate Incentives, Transmisson Technology, Wind Energy.
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Once every decade or so, the feds launch a new crusade to convert Americans to the metric system, only to give way to indifference or outright ridicule.

Contracts for federally funded highway projects were to conform to metric measurement by Sept. 30, 2000 — until Congress revoked the deadline. Yet federal agencies already had been required to go metric — both by the Omnibus Trade and Competiveness Act of 1988, which had imposed a 1992 deadline, and before that by Executive Order 12770, signed by President Bush the Elder in 1991. And of course, that was after President Reagan in 1982 had disbanded and cancelled funding for the U.S. Metric Board, which had been created seven years earlier through Public Law 94-168, the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, to coordinate the country’s voluntary conversion centimeters, kilograms, and degrees Celsius.

Now, however, comes a metric crusade of a different sort — a request from the staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, filed Feb. 3, 1010, asking for written comments from the U.S. electric utility industry on a set of performance metrics that the staff has proposed to track and evaluate the performance of ISO/RTO operations and their regional wholesale power markets. And like the metric initiatives that have marked the past forty years, this one appears mired in politics of the most divisive sort. Read more »

Posted: April 6th, 2010 under Benchmarking, California, California Public Utilities Commission, Electric Utility Regulation, Energy Price, FERC, ISOs, LMPs, Locational Marginal Prices, RTOs, Ratepayer Benefits.
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