Search Results for: smart grid

Worried About Too Much Demand Elasticity in Electric Power Markets

4 Comments / Complexity, Electricity, Energy markets / By

Michael Giberson Will electric power consumers facing smart-grid enabled real time prices have the potential to accidentally destabilize the power grid and cause a blackout?  A paper presented at a recent IEEE conference says it is a possibility. The surprising culprit? Too much price elasticity in the market demand function. It is a surprising culprit …

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A Heat Wave Without Blackouts

2 Comments / Economics, Electricity / By

Lynne Kiesling Last week’s heat wave in the US was record-setting. Historically, the combination of a persistent heat wave with static, regulated retail markets and fixed prices has resulted in brownouts or blackouts in peak hours (and, at least from my personal experience with ComEd, exploding transformers in substations). However, as reported by Martin LaMonica …

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Commercial, Merchant Compressed-air Energy Storage Plant Under Development?

7 Comments / Electricity, Technology / By

Michael Giberson Wind power RFP processes* are common enough these days, typically driven by renewable energy mandates placed on utilities. A recent wind power RFP announcement out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is different. A new company, Chamisa Energy, has initiated an RFP seeking wind power to pair up with a planned compressed-air energy storage …

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Home Energy Innovation from Direct Energy

3 Comments / Economics, Electricity, Technology / By

Lynne Kiesling Whirlpool and Direct Energy have long been two of the most forward-looking companies working in the electricity value chain. Whirlpool was the appliance partner on the GridWise Olympic Peninsula transactive network project, and have committed to all of their global products being grid friendly and transactive by 2015. Direct Energy, an energy retailer, …

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Dynamic Electric Power Prices for Residential Customers in Illinois

4 Comments / Electricity, Regulation / By

Michael Giberson From the Danville, Illinois Commercial-News, a report of a two-year old dynamic power price program for residential customers of Ameren in Illinois: The program offers customers the ability to track in real time, via the Web, the day-ending regional commodity price of electricity. And as the rate fluctuates, participants can adjust their usage …

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Hohm, and Cloud Computing

1 Comment / Economics, Electricity / By

Lynne Kiesling Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s Hohm energy management product announcement. Yesterday at earth2tech, Katie Fehrenbacher elaborated on the cloud computing angle, and how Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service might change energy data storage, computing, and business models. Microsoft, Google, and others are all exploring cloud computing, for good reason: The trend of …

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Environmental Benefits and the Production Tax Credit for Wind Power

11 Comments / Electricity, Energy markets, Politics / By

Michael Giberson Wind power has been subsidized by state and federal governments in the United States because it is seen as clean and renewable, and perhaps even because wind power is seen as glamorous. Consumers pay higher electric rates and taxpayers pay higher taxes to support these subsidies, and it is a quite reasonable public …

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