Honeywell is making a major play in the smart grid and demand response world, building on its already enormous client base of more than 100 utilities – with millions of customers – that the company says has already resulted in more than a gigawatt in saved electricity.
The company is building out a global footprint in smart grid with both large and small projects it says will underpin efficiency efforts and support end-user control of the systems that consume energy. Keep reading →
Imagine a government as efficient as the highest-performing private sector companies, delivering critical services to millions across the nation. CIOs and citizens alike want and expect this type of government. Cloud computing is at the heart of government’s potential to achieve significant operational efficiencies, and the speed at which cloud platforms are deployed is a big reason why. Without IT infrastructure, cloud computing makes it possible to deploy new systems, applications, platforms and more at previously unheard of rates. Instead of months and years, it can take as little as a few weeks to launch effective cloud applications.
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), stung by a federal regulatory ruling regarding its treatment of Northwest wind power producers, is proposing new measures-including splitting the cost for lost revenue-to mollify the wind producers when an overabundance of hydroelectric power leads BPA to curtail the wind turbines in the region.
BPA sells power from dozens of federal hydro projects in the Northwest, and it controls most of the transmission lines in the region. Federal regulators in December said BPA acted unfairly in shutting off wind power in spring 2011 when a big snowmelt gave it more electricity than it said it needed. BPA’s action was opposed by wind generators, led by Portland, Oregon-based Iberdrola Renewables, many of whom lost federal production tax credits and state renewable energy certificates when their turbines were shut down and who worried that BPA’s policy could set a precedent that would stifle future support for the industry in the region. Keep reading →
The best way to get $6 natural gas is to have everyone plan on $3 gas.
That was a sentiment heard repeatedly last week, during the winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) and the Department of Energy’s National Electricity Forum in Washington, DC earlier this month. Keep reading →
Stan Wise, Chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, welcomed today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission vote as bringing “certainty” to a project that is “$2 billion in the ground and $13 billion to go.”
The project structure Georgia Power and its parent, Southern Company, have set up, with Shaw as constructor and Westinghouse as nuclear vendor under contracts specifying schedule and budget, is vital to ensuring there are no cost overruns as there were in the 1980s when Georgia Power built Vogtle-1 and -2, he said. Keep reading →
As utilities generate more electricity from natural gas, the potential is emerging for freak weather or other events to cause problems for both delivery systems and create a cascading regional disaster, industry officials and regulators concluded in a “stress test scenario” played out in Washington, DC this past Sunday.
Planning to avoid such events, in which problems in the gas system aggravate problems in the electric system and vice-versa, is complicated by the two energy systems’ significantly different regulatory structures, officials said. Keep reading →
Policymakers must make more effort to de-risk geothermal exploration for investors and companies, said a vice-president at a leading US generation and utility company.
Jonathan Weisgall, VP of legislative and regulatory affairs at MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, said: “We need to de-risk this industry. The tech costs have to come down for investors too, and all the time there is the spectre of low natural gas prices. But above all we need regulatory certainty.” Keep reading →
The United Nations identified needed developments to eliminate the worst of world poverty in a program called the Millennium Development Goals. The key is to foster conditions for market-driven economic growth to create a safe infrastructure that includes the people most in need as empowered participants, not mere recipients of a handout. Success would eliminate current ineffectual foreign aid programs and uncoordinated charitable aid in favor of growth by-and for-the people.
In response, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) established a pilot program which identified Reliable Electricity as one of the key enablers of economic growth, especially in areas of the globe containing nearly 2 billion people subsisting on incomes of less than $2US per day. The correlation of poverty with lack of electricity is obvious, but solutions that truly effect sustaining economic change are not. Fortunately, we have learned that a small amount of electricity can have a huge benefit at an affordable cost. Moreover, the technology already exists to create a sustainable business model that, in principle, can grow rapidly to reach millions of people. Keep reading →
Efforts to build new transmission and expand natural gas production in the US have been a qualified success because of “studious” efforts to craft the right price signals and break down traditional monopolies on power generation and sales, a former state and federal energy commissioner says.
There has been more transmission built “in the last ten years than in the previous ten,” former Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Marc Spitzer told Breaking Energy in a recent discussion about his priorities as he reenters the private sector. Spitzer is currently a partner in the Electric Power Group at law firm Steptoe & Johnson, following his original indication he would leave FERC last summer and a final voluntary departure from the Commission in mid-December. Keep reading →
Geothermal resources could become California’s “bread and butter” baseload power as nuclear and gas-fired plants are retired, a state commissioner said this week.
The licence for the San Onofre nuclear power plant is due to expire in 2022, and the Diablo Canyon plant will not be permitted to continue generating after 2024, unless it applies for a 20-year extension. The facilities have a combined nameplate capacity of around 4,300 MW. Keep reading →
