Michael Giberson H. S. Knowlton said, “In the establishment of many kinds of modern business the question of cheap power is one of fundamental importance, and in not a few cases the industrial manager finds it a most difficult problem to decide between installing an isolated plant and contracting for central station service.” That’s from …
Michael Giberson Scientific American has an article on the start-up pains associated with smart grid development: Only one thing is worse than the lights not coming on when the switch is flicked—and that’s the lights going out right afterward. The fact that the problem is most often a burned-out lightbulb is testimony to the reliability …
Michael Giberson A paper by Giorgia Oggioni and Yves Smeers, “Degree of coordination in market-coupling and counter-trading,” examines the value of improving coordination between separate-but-interconnected power markets. (A post here last week cited a recent Windpower Monthly article that provides a good non-technical discussion of the issue. If you are not familiar with market coupling, …
Michael Giberson Windpower Monthly has a great article describing changes in the market for transmission capacity between power systems in Europe and the benefits of the changes. Here is a summary by way of selected quotes, but the full story is worth reading: Most of the electricity cables connecting Europe were built when electricity systems …
The Right Market Design for Trade Between Power Markets Read More »
Michael Giberson In the course of making a point about current political actions pursued by some in the electric power industry, Rob Bradley points to the views of industry pioneer Samuel Insull: Where did the drive for automatic pass-through of “reasonable” costs begin? For the electric industry, it began in Chicago in June 1898 in …
Samuel Insull’s Argument for State Regulation of Monopoly Electric Utilities Read More »
Michael Giberson Phil Carson reports a few parting thoughts from last week’s IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Transmission and Distribution Conference in New Orleans. One of those thoughts centered on the last-mile link up of communications and energy systems: Marty Travers, president for telecommunications at Black & Veatch, reminded me that the “telecom” piece at …
Where Water Management Meets Electricity Consumption, and Other Notes from New Orleans Read More »
Michael Giberson In January we noted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s questions concerning the integration of “variable energy resources” to the electric power grid. FERC asked for comments; over 120 comments have been submitted in reply (so far). Peter Behr, of ClimateWire, characterizes some of the positions submitted in the FERC inquiry in an article available …
Integrating Variable Energy Resources to the Electric Power Grid (cont.) Read More »
Michael Giberson According to Accenture, 46 percent of consumers surveyed said they didn’t want smart grid-based energy management systems if it leads to higher electricity bills. My guess is that the other 54 percent of consumers didn’t understand the question. The summary distributed by Accenture contains several other bits of should-be-obvious information – consumers are …
Michael Giberson Obviously the electric utility industry is very much in the experiment and learning phase (also known as “trial and error”) of the smart grid. Two examples are provided by PG&E in California and Xcel in Colorado. It is tempting to rush to judgment on the impossibility of an efficient, well-run, customer-centric smart grid …
Two Stories About Integrated Utility Smart Grid Programs Read More »
Michael Giberson Bloomberg reports on fraud via Spain’s subsidized feed in tariff rate for solar power: Preliminary evidence shows some solar stations may have run diesel-burning generators and sold the output as solar power, which earns several times more than electricity from fossil fuels, El Mundo said, citing unidentified people from the energy industry. The …
Making the Most of Spain’s Feed-in Tariff for Solar Power Read More »
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