The much anticipated, objected to, lobbyied about, editorialized on US Department of Energy study on electric grid reliability, markets, and policy has finally been released. Finally us commenters will actually know what we are talking about. Maybe. You can find the report on the DOE website along with Secretary Perry’s cover letter. I may comment …
Early Reactions to the Doe Grid Reliability Study Read More »
Yesterday’s solar eclipse across the US amplified a dominant issue in electricity policy discussions over the past couple of years — does increasing use of distributed energy resources like solar photovoltaics make the grid more resilient, or does it lead to imbalance and inadequacy? In California during the eclipse (Financial Times), solar generation dropped compared to …
Solar Eclipses and the Electric Grid: Markets and Automation Read More »
Dick Munson, Environmental Defense Fund’s Midwest clean energy director, and I have been working with, thinking about, and doing research on the evolution of technologies and regulation in the electricity industry for a long time. I have used Dick’s book From Edison to Enron in my own work, and his blog posts at EDF are …
Last week the commissioners of the Texas Public Utility Commission once again complained about retail power suppliers who gamed the ranking system on the state’s retail electric power shopping website www.powertochoose.org. This post summarizes the problem and then offers a simple solution. From the Houston Chronicle: Texas’ utility commissioners complained Thursday about confusing or misleading …
Institutional persistence creates some of the thorniest problems in public policy, including electricity policy. Institutions change more slowly than technology and markets, because of both design and status quo bias, which means that dynamic processes of economic and technological change can make regulatory institutions outdated. This mismatch is showing up right now in the electricity …
My R Street Policy Study: Electricity Market Alternatives to Regulatory Net Metering Read More »
The Adam Smith Institute has published a research report I wrote for them, Power Up: The framework for a new era of UK energy distribution. From the press release: The report … argues that new technologies such as smart grids and distributed energy production can revolutionise old models of energy distribution and pricing, in the …
Power Up: The Framework for a New ERA of UK Energy Distribution Read More »
On Tuesday the Distributed Energy Financial Group released its 2015 report, Annual Baseline Assessment of Choice in Canada and the United States (ABACCUS). The report provides an excellent overview of the current state of retail electricity markets in the 18 jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada that permit at least some degree of retail competition. The …
Abbacus Report Highlights Benefits of Retail Electric Markets Read More »
At the Dallas Morning News James Osborne reports on the controversy over minimum use fees in the competitive retail power market that includes most Texas households. As discussed here at Knowledge Problem last week, retail suppliers sometimes design contract offers to be especially cheap for consumers using 1000 kWh per month. The state’s powertochoose.org website …
Dallas Morning News on Competitive Retail Power Market Fees and Rate Designs in Texas Read More »
To help provide consumer information on competitive retail offers in the Texas electric power market, the Public Utility Commission of Texas maintains a website at www.powertochoose.org. Enter your zip code, click a button, and it will display the top ten (out of nearly 300) offers. Because the table shows the lowest priced offers first, with the average …
Gaming the Rankings on the Texas Power to Choose Website Read More »
The American Public Power Association (APPA) recently published an analysis of retail power prices, but it makes an elementary mistake and gets the conclusion wrong. The APPA analysis, “2014 Retail Electric Rates in Deregulated and Regulated States,” uses U.S. Energy Information Administration data to compare retail electric prices in “deregulated” and “regulated” states. The report itself presents …
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