Advanced Energy Perspectives

AEE has seen efforts to roll back energy efficiency requirements before, from the ongoing struggle to maintain Ohio’s successful efficiency standards in the face of legislative attacks and attempts to let big companies opt out of energy efficiency programs in Pennsylvania to the Trump Administration’s suspension of EE rules for central air conditioning. But this year, we saw something new: an attack on energy efficiency in the wholesale markets. As with other challenges to this money-saving advanced energy technology, AEE has taken it on. 

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its final 2016 data files (EIA-861), detailing valuable information such as sales, revenues, and utility data for the electricity industry. At AEE, we’ve been digging in. Two of the key trends we have been tracking this year, and that we analyzed first, are advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and time varying rates (TVR), by state. Which are the leaders in smart meters and smart rates? Not who you think.

When the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s long-awaited staff report on grid reliability came out in August, a lot of observers didn’t know what to make of it. In the long run-up to the report’s release, we at AEE had worked with our fellow industry groups AWEA, SEIA, and ACORE to challenge the premise of the study as ordered by Secretary Rick Perry, which was that the electric power system was in jeopardy due to the “premature” retirement of baseload power plants – namely coal and nuclear. When the report came out, it largely vindicated our view that cheap natural gas and slow load growth, not renewable energy policies, were forcing uneconomic power plants out of business, and that the changing mix of resources was being managed reliably by grid operators.

This led some observers to call the report a “rorschach test,” allowing anyone to read into it anything they’d like, or even a “nothingburger” (check out the URL to this analysiss). But we at AEE saw in it just enough grounds for proposing out-of-market financial supports for these uncompetitive power plants that would turn electricity markets upside down – and our CEO Graham Richards said so, in a statement picked up by The New York Times. Lo and behold, on Sept. 30 DOE submitted a proposed rule to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) doing just that, and on an accelerated timeline. Since then, a broad-based coalition of industry groups – call them “strange bedfellows” – has been fighting back against this wrongheaded, costly, and unnecessary bailout of failing power plants.

 A successful transition to a 21st Century Electricity System requires careful consideration of a range of issues that will ultimately redefine the regulatory framework and utility business model while creating new opportunities for third-party providers and customers to contribute to the operation of the electricity system. In this third in a series published by Utility Dive, AEE explores traditional and "pay for performance" approaches to energy efficiency (EE). 

A successful transition to a 21st Century Electricity System requires careful consideration of a range of issues that will ultimately redefine the regulatory framework and utility business model while creating new opportunities for third-party providers and customers to contribute to the operation of the electricity system. In this second of a 7-part series published by Utility Dive, AEE lays out strategies for achieving performance-based regulation. Previously, we covered Advanced Meters: Connectivity for the Modern Grid.