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.

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.

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.

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.

No Lack of Interest in US Energy Sector from Investors and Technology Firms

What I saw at the US and Japan conferences was very encouraging, especially if we really embrace the concept of an updated and restructured US and North American energy sector and markets. First, there is an enormous amount of money that would like to invest in the US energy sector from large and small private equity funds in the the US and abroad.

Women in Energy -- for a smile

Late Thursday, I received an email from my colleague Caren Byrd reminding me that March is Women in History Month. Many of us don't know the names of women who worked in the energy and electricity industry.

Thanks to Judith Warrick and Caren, we now have a better idea of what some of these women were faced with. Judith searched the web for names and came across short histories of five women who qualified and one that was just so sad and interesting she had to include it. Please share this with the women in your lives. Thanks.

Nora.

No Room for Mistakes in US Energy Sector Investment and Technology

The demand for capital investment in electric transmssion, distribution, generation, demand side management and smart grid technology are too great to make the same old mistakes. Yet a lack of regional planning in the US energy sector makes the likelihood of making big mistakes (wrong stuff, wrong place, too much/too little) a big risk. The solution may be better clarity by federal and State regulators on where they stand on new financial and technolgy entrants and programs they can establish to encourage innovation.