Advanced Energy Perspectives

The numbers are staggering: 33 million Americans have lost their jobs since the start of the COVID pandemic, including nearly 600,000 in the advanced energy industry. And by the end of June, that number could hit 850,000. That would be nearly a quarter of the 3.6 million advanced energy jobs that existed at the start of the year – a time when advanced energy was a $238 billion a year industry in the United States, with employment that was growing nearly twice as fast as U.S. employment overall. For those of us who work in the industry, we know the new reality all too well, as emails bounce back not with “out of office,” but rather “no longer works here” or “has been furloughed.” It’s heartbreaking. But there are things state policymakers – especially governors and public utility commissioners – can do to prevent advanced energy business from coming to a complete halt during the public health crisis, and keep the advanced energy industry in a position to aid the economic recovery that follows. Here we lay out five ways state policymakers could do just that.

I’m sure you don’t need another blog telling you how COVID-19 has changed everything. While I won’t be able to fully avoid some of that here, read on if you want to know what is still happening at some of the state utility commissions around the country where AEE is actively engaged. My colleagues and I are used to traveling to state capitals to engage in regulatory proceedings, and while that obviously isn’t possible, commissions have transitioned much of their work online. There’s some good news here, and if you are like me, you can use all the good news you can get.

Note: This was originally posted on powersuite-blog.aee.net

Can’t find toilet paper or eggs at the grocery store? We can’t help you there. But we can help you find everything you need to know about what’s happening in state public utility commission dockets and legislation around the country related to energy and COVID-19.  And since schools are closed and many of us are trying to figure out how to make learning fun, we’ll do this in the form of an interactive map and a coronavirus acrostic.

Photo by Tom Burke, used under a Creative Commons license. 

In July, we published a list of the top 10 utility regulation trends of 2018 – so far. With 2018 winding down, we check in on the top public utility commission (PUC) actions and trends of the year. Ten prominent trends and actions stand out above the rest, from renewables continuing their downward price trajectory, to electric vehicle charging infrastructure build-outs getting approved, to exploration of utility business model reforms and non-wires alternatives to traditional distribution investments. Here is the full round-up of the top 10 matters before PUCs in 2018.

Note: some links in this post reference documents in AEE's software platform, PowerSuite. Click here and sign up for a free trial.

U.S. utilities invest over $20 billion per year replacing and modernizing their electricity distribution infrastructure. As the electricity system continues to evolve, making sure that this money continues to be invested wisely, especially at a time of growing deployment of distributed energy resources (DER), is prompting changes to how utilities conduct distribution system planning.