On September 20, the PJM regional grid filed its second informational report with the FERC on Price-Responsive Demand (PRD). That’s the idea that, someday soon, electricity will be sold like other consumer products. Just like gasoline, for example, electricity prices would rise and fall in tune with supply and demand, forcing retail utility customers to think about how much electricity they really need – or even go without – should prices climb too high.

Welcome to the dark side of the smart grid – where America’s consumers could well come face to face with the mother of all rate shocks. Read more »

Posted: October 6th, 2010 under Dynamic Pricing, Energy Price, Price-Responsive Demand, Smart Grid.
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The all-day conference held this week at FERC on how to compensate demand response resources in wholesale power markets proceeded more or less as expected, as the witnesses took sides along the lines set out in the prior post, The Nutty Professors: Bill, Fred and the Strange Case of Demand Response.

But the salon erupted in fireworks during the very last five minutes, treating this reporter and others still on hand in the FERC meeting room to an unrehearsed and quite emotional give-and-take between commission chairman Jon Wellinghoff and senior commissioner Philip Moeller – highlighting a rift among FERC’s leaders on how best to move forward with the vision known as the Smart Grid. Read more »

Posted: September 16th, 2010 under Demand Response, Electric Utility Regulation, Energy Markets, Energy Price, FERC, Smart Grid.
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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.
Comments: 1