According to this press release, the municipal utility in Austin, Texas has installed a natural-gas-fired fuel cell combined heat and power system. Austin Energy installed the 200-kilowatt fuel cell system, which also produces 900,000 BTUs of usable heat per hour, at the Rebekah Baines Johnson Health Center. Electricity produced by the unit is fed into …
Yes, according to a press release and an order instituting rulemaking from the California Energy Commission yesterday. The Energy Commission?s plan is to work in conjunction with the California PUC, which has itself initiated an order instituting rulemaking to craft ?policies to develop demand flexibility as a resource to enhance electric system reliability, reduce power …
Yesterday the General Accounting Office released a report on the causes of the wholesale electricity price increases in California August-October 2000. U.S. Representatives Inslee and DeFazio requested the study, which had two objectives: determining whether or not wholesale sellers actually exercised market power to raise price above marginal cost, and determining if the design of …
Today’s LA Times has an article on a controversy over Medicine Lake, which is in a geothermally active area in northern California. Calpine is looking into constructing some geothermal generation plants, but local Native Americans worry that this use of the lake will sap it of its cleansing properties and traditional spiritual energy. It will …
RAND has released a report on the consequences of increasingly relying on natural gas as the primary fuel for generating electricity. This very good article in the San Jose Mercury News does a nice job of summarizing the risks inherent in such non-diversification, which the report highlights. Hedge, hedge, hedge; it may mean tolerating spending …
23 online wash trades of $1 billion to influence volumes, a 17 percent decrease in first-quarter net income, an SEC investigation of their trading practices, analyst downgrades of Duke stock. One of these in any week would be bad enough, but this is a pretty overwhelming concatenation of bad news. Investigating these wash trades should …
From the California newspapers, yesterday and today … the LA Times describes the conditions leading to the first Stage 2 alert (when reserves go below 5%); the San Francisco Chronicle attributes the stress, at least in part, to a breakdown in conservation. Today’s LA Times story also points out the lower conservation than last June, …
This article does a decent job of laying out the issues in something that most people find pretty arcane, but is a crucial debate in electricity deregulation — repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA). Actually, that article does a much better job of articulating the arguments against repeal of PUHCA, …
I’m not going to get into the California market manipulation fray any further for now, beyond providing links to stories summarizing the issues and commenting on the continuing vituperative rhetoric of politicians in California, without any willingness to acknowledge that the rules of their dysfunctional “market” did not forbid any of these trades. At the …
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