Nora Brownell's Energy Blog

The United Kingdom's Electricity Calculator

While browsing the BBC Online website, I came across an Electricity Calculator for the United Kingdom. The calculator allows anyone to see the impact of their electricity decisions on UK electricity prices and carbon emissions for the year 2020. In this post, you'll get to play Electricity Czar.

Sharing Ideas on Energy Regulation and Technology

Every organization involved in the energy sector uses the Internet to do research, find new business or to see what their competitors are doing. Sharing that information though is tough work, especially if the people doing the work are from different parts of the organization. Social Bookmarking tools like delicio.us can break down at least the technological barriers of sharing energy information.

RSS feeds in the North American Energy Sector

Most energy organizations in North America don't use RSS or Really Simple Syndication to push information to web users. That means that energy professionals who rely on these websites must check them a few times a day for updates. Of course, RSS is not very useful if you don’t have much information to share. But that's not the case with energy companies, RTOs and ISOs and national and state government agencies.

Sharing Energy Information in Simple English

Welcome back from your Labor Day Holiday or three week vacation abroad. Are you wondering what happened while you were gone? If you use RSS or Really Simple Syndication, all of the news would be waiting for you in your news reader. If you don't use RSS, then you'll have to go to your favorite websites and reconstruct what happened. Not very efficient and wastes time and money.

Virginia Commission discourages citizen participation in Energy Efficency Workshop

The Commonwealth of Virginia's State Corporation Commission makes it very easy for energy companies and the rich and powerful to participate in thier workshops. All they have to do is file their intention to participate via electronic filing. Not so for citizens. We'll have to file a paper copy with the Commission; no faxes are allowed. It also looks like the deadline for receipt of your filing is tomorrow. Read what you can do about it.

Return to old days will fail to solve energy woes

This post appeared in the OP ED section of the Patriot News on June 3, 2007. I feel very passionate about this issue and at the request of Nora Brownell, have given permission to publish it here. John Hanger, Penn Future .

Critics of Pennsylvania' restructured electricity market are either suffering from amnesia or blinded by ideology when they claim that returning to the old system will protect customers from high prices. Fifteen years ago (before restructuring), Pennsylvania's electric rate was about 15 percent above the national average. Electric customers in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metropolitan regions paid electric rates that were routinely around the 10 highest in the nation.

Former FERC Commissioners make case for continued support of Competitive Electricity Markets

I was thrilled and honored to join nine former FERC commissioners in a letter that supports competitive markets. The letter articulates not only a philosophy, but a series of substantive facts about the impact of markets.

Nora

LEDs and Demand Response Technologies- options to runaway electricity consumption

This is the last of a three-part post on my take of investor and energy technology conferences that I attended in the US and Japan. The attendees included :

1) Light Emitting Diodes called LEDs,
2) Demand Response Technologies
3) Grid Monitoring, and
4) Storage capacity (nice for solar particularly).

I'll focus on LEDs and Demand Response technologies in this post.

PJM's Integrity as Regional Transmission Organization must be assured

The recent comments of the PJM Market Monitor at the FERC Technical Conference on market oversight raised many issues about activities at the PJM Interconnection and the role of senior management regarding the responsibilities of the market monitor.

Did Electricity Deregulation really fail?

Yesterday I read an article in the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com, entitled Deregulation Burns Out which is based on a 14 page study by the Tellus Institute entitled "A Failed Experiment: Why electricity regulation did not work and could not work." I think the article misses the point on energy deregulation. I provide some food for thought in this post.