Hill Heat

U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) will discuss energy transmission issues at the National Press Club on Wednesday, September 30, at 12:00 p.m. Dorgan is the luncheon keynote speaker at The Energy Daily’s Transmission Siting Policy Summit. A question and answer period will follow his remarks.

Dorgan is a senior member of the Senate Energy Committee and Chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee. Dorgan helped craft the Energy Committee legislation that includes investments in energy transmission, and expanded production of traditional and renewable sources of energy.

The event is open to the media. Media wishing to attend should RSVP to Teri Fisher, Senior Event & Marketing Manager for The Energy Daily. Phone: 610-696-2484, Cell: 240-793-8344, Email: [email protected]. For more information on the event, go to www.theenergydaily.com/transmission_siting.

30/09/2009 at 12:00PM

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