public utilities fortnightly Archives

Oct 04

Clean Power Plan – The Corpse Phase

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

Last week I cracked open the most recent edition of Public Utilities Fortnightly and discovered an interesting topic worth sharing. It is an attorney’s commentary on the Supreme Court’s 6-3 opinion, West Virginia v EPA. You may not have heard of this directional case because the Dobbs case released a week before West Virginia dominated the news cycle. Upon reading the SCOTUS opinion, I learned that it references the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP). I wrote about the CPP three times, most recently in February of 2016, Clean Power Plan, The Coma Phase. There, I predicted Mitch McConnell would not...

Mar 15

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Resilience for a Power Grid Green Swan Event

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

Last week’s Reckoning post featured findings from a Wall Street Journal article that demonstrated our power grid is becoming less reliable, and I added that this would accelerate in the wrong direction over the next ten years. Like the Texas fiasco of February 2021, the causes of unreliability are smeared over many stakeholders such as regulatory, state, and federal government agencies, power suppliers, and voters. Utilities can be stuck in the middle, attempting to keep prices low while maintaining profits and keeping the pitchforks and torches at bay. Talk of adding an efficient combined-cycle natural gas plant will draw pitchforks...

Jun 04

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From 1985 With Lov(ins) – Prescient Predictions

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

As I get older, I’m more interested in old stuff, especially how our ancestors lived, the challenges they faced, and the technologies they used. As I mentioned last week, our ancestors needed to be more creative than we are today. They had to use their brains or work tirelessly to serve customers to be successful (some of this is still required today). Today, we simply make an algorithm to grind numbers to optimize processes. Compare the toil and ingenuity required to launch and build Facebook compared to Boeing, Ford, IBM, McDonald’s or Hilton. The efforts and ingenuity required to build...

May 07

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From Crazy to Rational; Slow or Fast(er)?

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant One Comment

We’re picking up where I left off a couple weeks ago with the dead kWh. That post was based on the Public Utilities Fortnightly article, cleverly titled, The Kilowatt Hour is Dead – Don’t Send Flowers. For that, I focused on whether or not customers will get involved and make a significant impact on a boring 1.3% of their life expense. That 1.3% is the slice taken up by electricity costs of the average consumer. This time, I'm training my laser on an old-school thought from utilities AS EXPLAINED BY[1] the author, Mark Gabriel, the CEO of the Western Area...

Apr 23

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The Kilowatt-Hour is Dead, Eh?

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant One Comment

The subject line is a response to a recent article in Public Utilities Fortnightly, written by Mark Gabriel, the Administrator and CEO of the Western Area Power Administration. Mr. Gabriel[1] discusses what he sees coming for the utility industry. I am sure he is far more qualified to predict the future than I am, but I can provide my Lilliputian commentary in response to his projections. I may be playing a little loose with Mark’s article, but he seems to indicate the utility industry is on the verge of upheaval. He states the stalwart concerns of utilities, including the strength...

Jan 22

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Untold Story of Disappearing Energy Jobs

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

On the subject of electricity generation sources and price, I’ve been reading numerous articles from various bona fide sources and started connecting dots. Public Utilities Fortnightly (PUF) has written about historically low electricity prices, as a percent of GDP or household spending, numerous times in the past year. Electricity price escalation has not kept pace with the consumer price index. As of last August, Steve Mitnick, of PUF shared data, which I plotted on the chart below. A year ago, I wrote about this topic as well in Low Electricity Prices - For How Long?. In that post, I explained...

Nov 13

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Electric Utility Meet Amazon.com; Legislators Wake Up

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant One Comment

This post, and the next couple, were spawned by an article written by John Hargrove in the latest edition of Public Utilities Fortnightly. The article’s title is, Utilities Can Do More to Partner with Customers. There may even be a follow-up to this article a few months from now. Wink. Wink. Anyone interested in this blog knows big changes are happening in the electric utility industry. For instance, I could write a series of posts on each of the following: State and federal subsidies are loading the grid with micro to utility-scale distributed energy resources, namely wind and solar photovoltaic...

Sep 25

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Reverse Diversification Coming to a Utility Near You

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant One Comment

In my Personal Finance class as an undergraduate, our instructor used the term diworsification[1] for large stalwart companies. Diworsification occurs when a company buys another company it knows nothing about and isn’t complimentary to the core business. Utilities got into this in the wild west days of 1990s deregulation, buying telecommunication and even real estate companies. That didn’t end well, and they went back to their core business of the regulated monopoly. In recent years we have experienced a reverse diversification of our power supply – namely in the reliable, conventional, thermal power plant sector. We still get almost half...

May 01

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Capacity Market v Energy Market – What’s the Diff?

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant 3 Comments

We are taking a break from exergy this week, and we are going to examine what is happening in distorted electricity markets around the country. This will be somewhat of a sequel to Regulating Deregulation and Wind's Other Big Subsidy. Too much of a good thing, or as they say, unintended consequences, is pushing the grid in some places toward instability. By the way, I scoff at the term “unintended consequences.” There are only two types of consequences: intended and ignorant ones. Utility Dive notes that Texas (Electricity Reliability Council of Texas – ERCOT) and the Southwest Power Pool are...

Feb 20

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Energy and Demand Resource Soup

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant 2 Comments

The AESP 2017 National Conference is in the rear view mirror. While I was, unfortunately, not able to attend many sessions, most of that time was spent talking with a lot of people. I absorbed a lot of information and hopefully some wisdom. This post discusses the increasingly complex and intertwined electric grid. Shifting Role to Grid Managers My findings from the conference jive with a recent article I read in Public Utilities Fortnightly (PUF). The subject of that article was the Power of Innovation, a utility executive’s roundtable that included representatives from Edison International, Exelon, Duke Energy, Oncor, Southern...

Clean Power Plan – The Corpse Phase

Resilience for a Power Grid Green Swan Event

From 1985 With Lov(ins) – Prescient Predictions

From Crazy to Rational; Slow or Fast(er)?

The Kilowatt-Hour is Dead, Eh?

Untold Story of Disappearing Energy Jobs

Electric Utility Meet Amazon.com; Legislators Wake Up

Reverse Diversification Coming to a Utility Near You

Capacity Market v Energy Market – What’s the Diff?

Energy and Demand Resource Soup

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