Archive for June 18th, 2008

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Current and future state of regional wholesale electricity markets

June 18, 2008

Michael Giberson

What is the current and future state of regional wholesale electricity markets?

FERC wants to know, and so it has assembled a panel of experts to appear at a July 1, 2008, technical conference to be held at the Commission. All interested persons are invited to attend, and there is no registration required.

The conference also will be webcast – the official notices says it will be available for a fee, but the event page on the Commission’s web calendar says the webcast is free. I don’t know which version is correct, but maybe someone from FERC will clear up the confusion.

The agenda (as included in the second notice):

Review of Wholesale Electricity Markets

9:30 Opening Remarks

9:45 ISO New England, Inc.

Gordon Van Welie, President and Chief Executive Officer
Hung-po Chao, Director, Market Monitoring

New York Independent System Operator
Karen Antion, Interim Chief Executive Officer
David Patton, President, Potomac Economics

PJM Independent System Operator, Inc.
W. Terry Boston, President and Chief Executive Officer
Joseph Bowring, Manager, Market Monitoring Unit

12:00 Break

1:00 California Independent System Operator

Yakout Mansour, President and Chief Executive Officer
Keith Casey, Director, Department of Market Monitoring
Frank Wolak, Chairman, Market Surveillance Committee

1:45 Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator

T. Graham Edwards, President and Chief Executive Officer
David Patton, President, Potomac Economics

Southwest Power Pool, Inc.
Nick Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer
Richard Dillon, Director, Market Development and Analysis

3:15 South and West Regions

Charles Whitmore, Senior Market Advisor
Division of Energy Market Oversight, Office of Enforcement

4:00 Adjourn

For those of you interested in looking this stuff up on the FERC website, the official docket number is AD08-9-000.

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets, Politics | Comments Off

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Can you spot the attitude difference?

June 18, 2008

Lynne Kiesling

Note these items from the Financial Times:

1. Peugeot and Mitshubishi enter an electric car alliance, striving toward plug-in hybrid vehicles. The same article notes that Bosch and Samsung have entered into an alliance to develop better lithium-ion batteries.

2. Ford and GM call on the federal government to support plug-in hybrid development; from a speech at a Google/Brookings plug-in hybrid conference last week:

Ford Motor has joined General Motors in calling for direct US government intervention to boost the market for plug-in electric vehicles, which Detroit’s carmakers fear could become dominated by Asian manufacturers.

Mark Fields, head of Ford’s Americas business, said that government should be a “key partner in promoting American manufacturing” of plug-in cars and the lithium-ion batteries that power them through tax incentives, research subsidies and other measures.

“A business case will not evolve, in the near term, without support from Washington,” Mr Fields said on Wednesday in a speech at Washington DC.

Really? Really? Does he mean that $4 gas, which has torpedoed the market for Hummer, isn’t shifting consumer demand sufficiently to create a near-term business case for plug-in hybrid R&D?

Did he say that with a straight face?

Meanwhile, Wired writer Chuck Squatriglia complains about the federal research commitment announced at the same conference:

The Department of Energy made a big deal of the hand-out, announcing it at a plug-in hybrid conference in Washington D.C., but c’mon — $30 million? To be spread out among three companies over three years? What’d it do — scrounge change from couch cushions in the Pentagon? EV advocates were quick to thank Uncle Sam for the money but said it’s going to take a whole lot more than that to wean us from oil — which, by the way, will collect $17 billion in tax breaks during the next decade.

Toyota is getting right to it, and will release a plug-in in two years. Other aforementioned companies are also proceeding with plug-in R&D.

Why are Ford and GM pleading to the government for subsidies? They have made horrendous business decisions, and now they are suffering the consequences. [snark]It didn’t take long for the business case for some of those bad decisions to evolve, did it!?![/snark] Are they really so behind the curve, and is the overall social benefit so large, that taxpayer money should subsidize their previous bad business acumen? I say no.

I agree with Squatriglia that the oil company tax concessions should not exist, but I can’t see the economic argument for spending taxpayer money to subsidize research that other companies are already voluntarily performing.

Posted in Economics | 1 Comment »

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The importance of energy storage for integrating renewables

June 18, 2008

Lynne Kiesling

This ars technica article on energy storage provides a concise summary of the challenge of energy storage and the current technology options. Focusing on the power needs of datacenters, the article describes the intermittency problem associated with renewable sources (in normal language, the sun doesn’t necessarily shine and the wind doesn’t necessarily blow at times that coordinate naturally with electricity demand).

Energy storage is the Holy Grail of the electricity system. Even if we did have dynamic pricing to enable decentralized coordination between supply and demand, it would be highly unlikely to match up perfectly all the time. Storage bridges that gap. Storage also changes the market power dynamic; if I have a storage option I can buy more when it’s cheaper and use it when it’s pricier. That alternative creates a substitute for generated on-demand peak power.

Posted in Economics, Electricity | 2 Comments »

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