According to Energy Online Daily News article, the California Independent System Operator found that Duke Energy did not withold energy and cause a blackout on 8 May 2001. This ISO investigation was in response to an earlier California PUC report, on which I commented extensively (and critically) in this post.
Here and here are a couple of articles, from different perspectives, analyzing the decline in profitability in the British electricity industry over the past year. The past year has seen both a regulatory change in Britain and a decline in electricity prices, and several companies are not faring well in this economic environment. The credit …
According to the most recent annual survey of electric deregulation by Deloitte and Touche, consumers are at a six-year low in their awareness of energy issues. The study correctly draws the conclusion that this lack of awareness in electricity stems from the stagnation of restructuring in the post-California, post-Enron environment of political and financial uncertainty. …
In a Philadelphia Inquirer column yesterday, Andrew Cassel said it beautifully: The real shame of Enron isn’t that its top executives got filthy rich off of crooked deals and phony accounting. It’s that the company took a good idea and poisoned it. The good idea is competition, specifically competition in the production and delivery of …
Experimental Economics and Retail Electricity Deregulation: Demonstrating the Benefits of Choice Regulatory change in electricity moves slowly, in part because of human dislike of change and aversion to risk. Convincing people that regulatory change is worth undertaking would be a lot simpler if we could demonstrate the possible outcomes of a change, and thereby that …
Experimental Economics As an Electricity Policy Tool Read More »
As I argue in this presentation delivered last week at the Ronald Coase Institute Workshop on Institutional Analysis, the bifurcated PX/ISO pool trading structure created a myriad of incentives for both buyers and sellers to behave strategically. Furthermore, because I was making a methodological point to the students, better institutional analysis could have lessened or …
The Consequences Of Failing To Do Sound Economic Institutional Analysis: Read More »
Energy expert and industry veteran Ed Reid and I wrote this article for the Reason publication Privatization Watch. Punch line: distributed generation could go a long way toward helping us deal with energy infrastructure issues (especially transmission construction) in a cost-effective and flexible manner, but intended and unintended government barriers still exist. Here’s the conclusion: …
My friends at the Center for the Advancement of Energy Markets have a superb rebuttal to a Houston Chronicle letter calling for the re-regulation of electricity in Texas. The author of CAEM’s rebuttal, Nat Treadway, has written a clear and thoughtful reponse to this ridiculous idea.
Here’s a great example of the competitive, market process dynamic at work. According to this article, American Electric Power is planning to retire, or mothball, 16 of its older gas-fired plants in Texas. The article says it well: The decision to deactivate the plants is a result of the introduction of electricity deregulation and competition …
I haven’t focused on it much here, but the FERC had set the wholesale “soft price cap” in California to rise from $91.87 to $250 today. As this article reports, the new price cap has been delayed a month to allow officials to incorporate changes from a computer test of manipulation possibilities. Of course, this …
What’s New With The California Wholesale Price Cap? Read More »
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