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…

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 how…

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 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 our…

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 the…

Feb 06

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Investing in Utilities

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

Most readers have likely seen the business triangle: cheap, fast, good ; pick two. My first emotional reaction to the triangle was that it was something a lazy bum would say. However, as a geezer, I think the law is valid for consulting. I will explain this in a future post. For utilities, it would be something else; maybe cheap, constant, yes. Those are the price, time, and quality attributes of utility delivery. For utilities, the term “constant” represents reliability. The term “yes” represents quality or accuracy. In this case, 60 Hertz and the applicable constant voltage. I explained how…

Oct 03

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Evaluation, Measurement and Verification 2.0; A Whale Bus or an Airbus?

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant 2 Comments

Evaluation, Measurement and Verification 2.0, or EM&V 2.0, is a nerdy term coined in 2014, according to this blog by Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP). The hype of EM&V 2.0, which I will explain later, is that it will automate measurement and verification, putting us engineers out of business. This is not going to happen anytime soon. Definition 2.0 The definition of EM&V 2.0 boils down to using utility meter interval data, typically hourly or sometimes every 15 minutes, or maybe even 5 minutes, to disaggregate and measure impacts from energy efficiency measures. One could consider that EM&V 2.0 is…

Aug 22

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Utility Scale vs Small Distributed Generation – Protection by Savage Suffolks

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

The June issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly (PUF) featured a supplemental, special report in collaboration with Navigant Research. One of the interesting articles in that publication is Impacts, Threats, Opportunities of renewable energy production. It compares utility scale to distributed renewable power generation. To refresh your memory, or perhaps for new subscribers, see my post on the Bogus Energy Internet of Things where I describe, in relatable terms, that distributed dinky power supply compared to the grid makes very little to no sense. The PUF/Navigant article backs this with the prices of wind and solar renewable energy generation for distributed…

Jul 11

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FERC 745 – The Worst Order Ever Produced?

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant One Comment

Robert Borlick writes in Public Utilities Fortnightly that FERC Order 745 is “one of the worst orders FERC has ever produced” – “a time bomb for electricity consumers”. Whoa! I better sharpen my axes. That is a more lethal statement than I would even write, and it isn’t even in the opinion section. It’s a featured article. Let’s take this a step at a time. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is adorned with the authority to regulate “the sale of electric energy at wholesale in interstate commerce”. As noted in DC Smackdown of FERC, regulation of interstate commerce is…

Clean Power Plan – The Corpse Phase

Resilience for a Power Grid Green Swan Event

From 1985 With Lov(ins) – Prescient Predictions

Untold Story of Disappearing Energy Jobs

Reverse Diversification Coming to a Utility Near You

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

Investing in Utilities

Evaluation, Measurement and Verification 2.0; A Whale Bus or an Airbus?

Utility Scale vs Small Distributed Generation – Protection by Savage Suffolks

FERC 745 – The Worst Order Ever Produced?

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