Hill Heat

Many Americans have grown concerned about the monopoly power that Big Tech corporations wield. But few people realize that the problem of concentrated private power also infects the electricity sector. In most regions, electricity is controlled by a single investor-owned utility with a government-granted monopoly. Across the country, powerful utilities are actively blocking decentralized solar energy, degrading the reliability of the power lines even as they raise prices, and failing to make the grid investments needed for a clean, carbon-free future.

Join the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for an inspiring conversation with advocates who are taking on electric utility monopolies with the aim of accelerating the shift to clean energy and winning democratic community control.

20/01/2022 at 01:00PM

Register now to join our panelists and submit your own questions as they discuss what the winter storm in Texas and the southeastern United States revealed about public health, housing, energy, and economic and climate justice.

Roundtable participants include:

• Amal Ahmed, journalist with Texas Observer and author of this piece on Texas climate change for Southerly. Ahmed will moderate the discussion.
• John Cooper, Assistant Vice President for Public Partnership & Outreach and the Director of Texas Target Communities at Texas A&M University
• Tim Callaghan, evaluation director for the Southwest Rural Health Research Center, Texas A&M University
• Lyndsey Gilpin, founder and editor of Southerly Magazine
• Mary Annette Pember, independent journalist focusing on Native American issues, including environmental issues on Native lands.

30/03/2021 at 03:00PM

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Congressman Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) have introduced legislation to prepare the nation’s power grids to affordably and reliably deliver clean energy. Many of the provisions of the Grid Services and Efficiency Act were included in Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act, which the House of Representatives passed last week.

“The Grid Services and Efficiency Act instructs a cross-section of federal and regional agencies to work together to pinpoint gaps in grid services and operator platforms that may hamper the introduction of clean energy sources to the power grid. The legislation authorizes funding to upgrade electricity delivery infrastructure to better accommodate clean energy sources. The bill would also help determine whether federal regulators have the proper authorities to oversee the siting of interregional transmission lines necessary for expanding clean energy.”

The Grid Services and Efficiency Act takes steps to accelerate the transition by improving power system modeling and grid operator planning, commissioning studies of grid efficiency, and improving the connectivity of the electricity transmission system.

This legislation is supported by Advanced Energy Economy, Sunrun, National Grid, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Exelon, and the WATT Coalition.

Further summary:

From the Wonk Room.

An all-star cast of the leading voices in the new Obama era is convening at the Newseum in Washington DC to discuss the future of U.S. energy policy. The National Clean Energy Project follows a similar meeting convened by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) last summer in Nevada. But much has changed in the past few months. The new administration – including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and White House energy adviser Carol Browner – have committed to a multibillion investment in a new clean energy grid with the economic recovery act signed into law last week by President Obama.

The webcast of the event can be seen at NationalCleanEnergyProject.org.

Former senator Tim Wirth of Colorado introduces the meeting.

10:30 PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON

Every time before in the last thirty years when I started this … every time oil dropped people said give my Hummer back. They’re not saying that any more. I want to thank everybody this economic recovery bill has good things in it and I’m grateful as a citizen. We have to maximize the value of this economic recovery. The big short-term gains in jobs and greenhouse gas reductions are in energy efficiency advances.

10:35 VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE

We really do have a planetary emergency. This sounds shrill to many ears. We’re still not used to thinking in those terms. We’ve seen the oil price roller coaster. This roller coaster’s headed for a crash and we’re in the front car.

10:45 HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI

We have to hold together or we will all regret the missed opportunity.

10:55 T. BOONE PICKENS

Geothermal does not operate an eighteen-wheeler. Get realistic… I’m running out of time. But we are going to have an energy policy in America.

11:00 JOHN PODESTA, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS ACTION FUND

We have to recognize we’re living through a terrible recession, a dependence on fossil fuels, and the almost existential threat of global warming.

will come out of the Energy Committee.

From the Wonk Room.

The Obama economic recovery plan makes a major investment in the modernization of our electricity infrastructure, in order to transform an often-overwhelmed patchwork of balkanized regional networks into a national “smart grid” based on Internet-like technology. Repower America, Al Gore’s campaign to have America use 100% renewable electricity in ten years, argues that a national smart grid “will save money, increase reliability and protect consumers from outages, and make possible a clean electricity system.”

Building a smart grid requires both new technology and regulatory policy. In addition to a $20 billion investment in smart grid deployment, the recovery plan offers $2 billion in grants to promote a subtle but key shift in electric utility regulatory policy:

Policies that ensure that a utility’s recovery of prudent fixed costs of service is timely and independent of its retail sales, without in the process shifting prudent costs from variable to fixed charges.

Traditional electricity utility pricing discourages utilities from promoting conservation and efficiency—instead, the more wasteful their consumers are, the better. So demand goes up, utilities build new power plants, and still costs rise. Utility shareholders’ interests are pitted against the rest of society.

Therefore, several states have implemented policies that decouple profitability (“recovery of prudent fixed costs of service”) from demand (“retail sales”), by using public funds and rate adjustments to guarantee an expected annual profit for the utility company and to subsidize investment in energy efficiency.

Obama’s economic recovery package contains $2 billion in state-level block grants that will be released “only if the governor of the recipient State notifies the Secretary of Energy that the governor will seek, to the extent of his or her authority, to ensure” that decoupling and energy efficiency incentive programs will occur.

Because our electrical infrastructure is a vital public resource, the profits of utility executives and shareholders must not be put above the public good. As Public Citizen warns, decoupling for unregulated utilities can lead to “windfall profits for the industry.” The California electricity debacle exposed the great failure of the experiment of utility deregulation, and the recovery package does not go far enough to bring utilities back under control.

President Obama, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and legislators like Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) have stated that our entire nation needs to move to a low-carbon economy as rapidly as possible, highlighting transformation of the electricity grid as a key component.

Full decoupling language in the House-passed economic recovery package (HR 1):

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) and the Working Group for Investment in Reliable and Economic Electric Systems (WIRES) invite you to the first of two briefings designed to explore key issues associated with the planning, construction, operation, and regulation of the nation’s high voltage interstate electric transmission network. Transmission issues have emerged as a major concern to policymakers and a broad variety of stakeholders over the past few years. As the new Congress and Administration prepare to take action on matters involving clean energy development, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, energy independence, and the reliability and security of electricity supplies, the investment in the “grid” has become an increasingly important matter of national energy policy. The physics and evolution of modern transmission systems are complex. An understanding of grid operations, planning, facilities siting, finance, and regulation nevertheless starts with these basics.

The first session (January 15) will provide a basic explanation of how the high-voltage “grid” actually works, what it accomplishes, and how it is regulated. A panel of experts on electric transmission operations and regulation will address the history and basic components of the grid, how electric power flows are controlled, the basics of grid interconnection and operations, the limitations of the system, and how operators address those limitations. This briefing also will survey the fundamentals of rate regulation and cost allocation, organized (Regional Transmission Organizations, or RTO) and bilateral (non-RTO) markets, regional transmission planning, siting, and reliability concerns. Although this briefing is for the uninitiated, the panel will invite questions at any technical level.

Speakers for this event include:

• James Hoecker, former Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and Counsel to WIRES
• Kevin Kelly, Director, Policy Analysis and Rulemaking, FERC
• Wayne Galli, PhD, Director, Transmission Development, NextEra Energy Resources (formerly FP&L Energy)
• Gregory Ioanidis, Vice President, Business Strategy, ITC Holdings

This briefing is free and open to the public. No RSVP required. For more information, contact Laura Parsons at (202) 662-1884 or [email protected].

A second session will follow in February, with details posted at www.eesi.org as they become available. This briefing will tackle the major high-visibility policy challenges facing policy makers as they balance the need for investment in transmission with other energy-related objectives.

15/01/2009 at 02:00PM

From the Wonk Room.

Former Vice President Al Gore is set to give a major energy policy speech today, in which he will challenge “the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years, an audacious goal he hopes the next president will embrace.” Gore is speaking at noon at the Daughter of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in Washington D.C.

The electricity sector is the largest producer of greenhouse gases in the United States, with its fossil-fired power plants and an obsolete power grid generating one-third of all our global warming emissions. Gore’s “unprecedented challenge” is a “moonshot” goal, but it is also on the scale of what is needed to avoid climate catastrophe. To stabilize the climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that industrialized nations need to cut emissions to 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels. For the United States, whose emissions have risen 15 percent since 1990, that goal translates to 34 to 48 percent below today’s pollution. Transforming the grid would cut global warming pollution by 33 percent from current levels by 2018—what we need for an even shot to halt our global fever.

Moving to all clean electricity would likely spur related reductions in the transportation sector, as the new “smart grid” of electricity distribution designed for renewable sources such as solar and wind power would be able to use plug-in hybrid vehicles for distributed electricity storage. Instead of everyone reliant on a few massive power plants controlled by large utilities, the system would allow both large and small-scale electricity production and storage. The giant wind farms of T. Boone Pickens would be complemented by millions of solar roofs, all feeding into the same dynamic electricity network.

Dr. Lawrence Jones, Account Executive for Automation Information System Business Unit, Areva T&D, will discuss smart transmission and distribution technologies for a clean environment and secure electricity infrastructure.

CSIS
4th Floor Conference Room
1800 K Street, NW

01/07/2008 at 10:00AM