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Electric Utility- A CEO’s Many Bosses
I’ve come to realize over the course of many years that the electric utility business is fascinatingly challenging. No other industry that I can think of has more bosses than an electric utility. In...
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The Nuclear Option- Show Me the Love
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) announcement a couple weeks ago to decrease carbon emissions from power generating plants by 30% has kicked up a lot of cheering, but also mudslinging and...
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Electric Vehicles; I’ll Take the Bus, Thanks
When consumers are considering the purchase of an electric vehicle, what are they thinking? Good question. I would be thinking, how can I fully utilize it and what are the limitations? The limitation...
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Utility Industry Disruption? Electricity is not a Movie
Because everyone reading this blog is in some way reliant on money from electric and/or gas utilities, I pay a lot of attention to the utility business and things like technological disruption and the...
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Renewable Energy Pricing- A Tomato Tale
This year was a blowout for tomato production at the Ihnen household. Enough tomatoes were planted such that if a tomato plague blighted the Ihnen ranch, wiping out 90% of the crop, there would still...
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Utility 2.0; Decoupled and Disaggregated
A lot of people have subscribed to the Energy Rant in recent weeks, so I think a little re-introduction is in order. Last week, the post was entitled Gamification; from a Non-Gamer. That was...
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Energy Storage v Storing Energy’s Benefits
As we march along with the nation’s rather massive build-out of renewable energy resources, questions emerge for how to fill the gaps when the sun sets and the wind stops blowing – i.e., when it’s nice...
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Utility of the Future; Rebates for Load Building Anyone?
The source of this week’s post about the utility of the future is this Utility Dive article about Pacific Gas and Electric’s proposed incentives for electric vehicles. The article made me think of...
View ArticleNatural Gas is a Wonderful Fuel, Btu, er But,,,
New ideas are great, but there is no replacement for accumulated experience to assess the landscape ahead and see potential trouble on the horizon. This is one of my most important responsibilities for...
View ArticleMarket Forces Give (Carbon Reduction); Market Forces and Flawed Policy Take Away
What is the purpose of the Clean Power Plan? To reduce emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030? No. It has major flaws for actual, as in reducing tons of carbon dioxide release to the atmosphere,...
View ArticleUtility Scale vs Small Distributed Generation – Protection by Savage Suffolks
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,...
View ArticleResidential Demand Charges; Harpooning Red Herring
On the one hand, this article from Utility Dive, The flaws in the utilities’ push for residential demand charges, had me shaking my head left and right in disagreement. On the other, not so much...
View ArticleDistributed Energy Resources – Messing with Near Perfection
A couple years ago at an AESP conference, we had a fascinating speaker and topic. It was one of those that had me thinking deeply and philosophically. The subject was technology and the future. The...
View ArticleThings You Need to Know Re Electric Vehicles
Last week I wrote about understanding the customer and knowing what they want, whether the customer is the utility, regulator, or the end user of energy. Taking this a step beyond, the customer/client...
View ArticleEnergy and Demand Resource Soup
The AESP 2017 National Conference is in the rear view mirror. While I was, unfortunately, not able to attend many sessions, most of that time was spent talking with a lot of people. I absorbed a lot of...
View ArticleReverse Diversification Coming to a Utility Near You
In my Personal Finance class as an undergraduate, our instructor used the term diworsification[1] for large stalwart companies. Diworsification occurs when a company buys another company it knows...
View ArticleRenewable Energy, Bad Parents, and Midwest Strawberries
If you enjoyed the greatest modern decade of sports, when MJ went six for six in the NBA finals, you would remember this McDonald’s commercial nearby. In it, Larry challenges Michael to a game of trick...
View ArticleEnergy Efficiency in a Land of Renewable Foie Gras
A couple weeks ago in Renewable Energy, Bad Parents, and Strawberries, I wrote that the value of an electrical generating resource depends a little on how cheaply it can produce energy (kWh), but a LOT...
View ArticleWhy Energy Efficiency? – Five Findings
This year ACEEE published a three-part series on why people and companies invest in energy efficiency. First, they provide some guesstimates of energy efficiency investment in the United States. Their...
View ArticleBlockchain Energy Authentication and the Cheaters’ Nightmare
One sign of a good teacher is how many things stick with a student through life. As I thought through the Bitcoin maze, I thought of the following gems I collected from my personal finance instructor:...
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