grid

Pennsylvania has one year of experience with deregulation of its electricity markets.  Residential, commercial, and industrial customers can now switch to alternative electricity suppliers in a quest to manage the generation and transmission costs on their electricity bills.  With some suppliers, they can even get energy from...[read more]

Building a low-carbon economy requires bold ideas and long-term thinking on a scale that matters. Ideas like The Atlantic Wind Connection. The Atlantic Wind Connection,  you may recall, is a company that has embarked on a multi-billion dollar, decade-long project to build an undersea transmission cable stretching about 350 miles...[read more]

It seems to have a lot going on for for a country that is pulling the plug on nuclear energy German Chancellor Angela Merkel hit the big red "stop" button earlier this year calling for the closure of all 17 nuclear reactors that provide about one-quarter of the nation's electricity.  Eight reactors have been shut so far with the...[read more]

In addition to reducing carbon footprint, empowering customers to more cost-efficiently manage their energy usage and fueling new business opportunities, the Smart Grid offers tremendous promise in terms of improving the reliability and availability of electricity service. Increased reliance on “microgrids” is one way how.In a microgrid...[read more]

Guest post by By Craig Shields, Editor, 2GreenEnergy.com As I told the audience in my recent presentation at the Electric Vehicle Summit, I actually see this subject as one of very few bright spots happening in the world today. In particular, it appears that the divorce between Big Auto and Big Oil will be a messy and ugly affair, but...[read more]

    TEPCO, the Japanese power company who own the Fukushima nuclear power plant, are in an unenviable position. Their Fukushima nuclear power plant is the site of one of the world’s worst industrial accidents, they have been accused of not just incompetence but of falsifying safety records and yet they have to continue to...[read more]

Feebates can be implemented locally in budget-neutral ways, and can be tailored to avoid leakage by combining a number of incentives and disincentives into a comprehensive framework of policies, to most effectively accomplish desired shifts.[read more]

The days of easy oil are over for everybody. Increasingly, producers are facing the challenges of recovering oil and gas from depleted or dispersed fields. To make things even more challenging, many new offshore reservoirs are more than 3000 meters below the surface.  How do you process this oil when it is so difficult to reach?...[read more]

Last week I wrote about the challenges of Smart Grid data impacting utilities and potential outsourcing trends.  While utilities do have a learning curve to climb about data management and analytics, end users (residential, commercial, and industrial customers) also need to learn the ramifications of the creation and use of entirely...[read more]

In sum: “The BPA has backed away from formally implementing the wind-curtailment plan, a move that renewables advocates applauded. But it hasn’t come up with an alternative. “[read more]

Michael Giberson The Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled that the Arizona Corporation Commission was acting within its authority when it decided to require utilities to secure a portion of their electric power from renewable resources. The Goldwater Institute had argued that the Commission’s authority was limited to setting rates and that...[read more]

Michael Giberson Two groups of municipal utilities in Texas, long critical of electric power deregulation in Texas and ERCOT in particular, have joined forces to issue a report, “The story of ERCOT: The grid operator, power market & prices under Texas electric deregulation.” The municipals describe the report as examining “governance...[read more]

By Ulrich Decher, Ph.D.President Obama during his 2011 State of the Union address stated that we should have one million electric vehicles (EV) in the United States by 2015. The benefits of that would be to to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to reduce emissions. These are worthy goals. This article will take look at the economic...[read more]

State public utility commissions that approve and oversee in the vast majority of national electricity infrastructure investment suddenly find themselves at the precise nexus of national energy policy needs and the emerging energy technologies that can address them. It is essential that over the next few years the advanced battery industry and the developers of other advanced energy technologies engage with state public utility commissions as never before.[read more]

This is my fifth article relating directly to SmartGrid. This is where the message FROM "the edge" also becomes a message ABOUT "the edge." As I learned at GridWeek, the grid industry calls the electricity user community at the far end of the system "The Edge". Graphically the system is frequently depicted that way with a central power...[read more]