In addition to managing the Power Markets Project, I also am a correspondent for POWER Magazine and Greentech Media.  

This month I wrote about the legal battle raging around FERC Order 745, which sets guidance for how RTOs should handle demand response.  You can read more at powermag.com.

From its modest origins as a way to shed load when the grid is stressed, demand response (DR) has grown to be a significant player in electricity markets. In the PJM region, demand response has accounted for as much as 14,833 MW of capacity, almost 10% of the total.

Demand response has had a huge effect on market prices, shaving off the lucrative peak periods when generators could count on their biggest rewards. In 2013 alone, it delivered $12 billion in customer savings in PJM.

But savings to a customer look like revenue losses to energy generators. This above all has resulted in a massive pushback against demand response.

Read more...

The venerable Electricity Journal has published the overview paper from the Power Markets Project, Aligning Markets with Clean Energy Policy.  It is now available in the December issue.

This is my second time in the EJ.  The first time was in 1998, for my research for the Energy Center of Wisconsin on green power marketing. 

If you are not a subscriber to EJ you can also read it on the Power Markets website.

You can also listen to and watch the "audio slide" presentation that I did for the Electricity Journal website.  Just click below. It is a shorter version of the talk I gave at the NARUC conference.

Thanks to my recent experience in studying the Energiewende and visiting Germany, I've been invited to speak on a panel of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), on November 16 in San Francisco.

The theme:  Germany's Transition to Renewables:  Gutsy or Foolhardy?

As NARUC describes it -- "Some news reports paint an optimistic picture of Germany's efforts to de-fossilize and de-nuclearize its electricity production. Yet industry reports show there are issues, both financial and electrical, to be addressed. We'll ask four experts to react to a particularly upbeat news cast regarding Germany's transition to renewables and help us understand the positive and not-so-positive aspects of that country's energy policies."

I'll be joined on the panel by three transAtlantic experts --

• Julia Hamm - Director, Solar Electric Power Assn (SEPA), who recently led a delegation of US energy industry people to Germany.

• Dr. Lola Infante - Dir.of Generation Fuels and Market Analysis, Edison Electric Institute.  EEI recently commissioned a paper on lessons learned from Germany.

• Jurgen Weiss - Principal, The Brattle Group, who recently wrote a paper for the US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) also on lessons learned.

After a roundtable discussion, we each get to present a lesson.  Mine will be on the concept of "net demand" and the need to plan for flexibility in a future power system with much more wind and solar power.

I'll post it here afterwards, so come back again.

My article on "Texas and Germany: Energy Twins?" has been picked up by The Globalist, a world affairs news site.  You can read it here.

The benefit is that it is much shorter than the version in POWER Magazine, and with fewer pesky graphics.  Enjoy.

The good wonks at Agora Energiewende, the think tank in Berlin devoted to the German energy transition, have introduced new tools to track the German energy system.

The new "Agorameter" tracks electricity production hourly by fuel source, wholesale prices, and imports and exports.  It is currently all in German, but easy enough to understand once you remember a few key words and colors.

For starters, Kraftwerk is not only an awesome band from the 1970s, it also means "power plant."  Strom is electricity, and Strompreis is the price of electricity.  Stromerzeugung and stromverbrauch means power production and consumption.

For renewables:  Wind and solar are the same in English, biomasse is what I like to call biopower, andlaufwasser is hydropower. 

The conventional fuels are gas, nuclear (kernenergie) and two types of coal, both aptly named:  lignite they callbraunkohle; sub-bituminous, or black coal, is called steinkohle, which I like to pronounce "stink-hole."

Pumped storage hydro is pumpspeicher und speicherwasser.

The graphic embedded here shows power production for the last couple of days, with conventional Kraftwerk in gray, wind in blue, solar in yellow, and biomass and hydro running flat on the bottom in green and blue. 

Click on it to go to the Agora website for more detailed information on prices and exports.

Then everybody dance with Kraftwerk!

Power grid operators need to plan for the future,  but how do they know what to plan for?  They make forecasts of the future, incorporating expected supply and demand, economic growth, weather trends, and demographic changes.

No one has a crystal ball, but clearly planners could do better.

The Project for a Sustainable FERC recently commissioned a report from the Brattle Group that finds PJM consistently overestimates future demand because they underestimate the effectiveness of energy efficiency programs.  By 2022, they estimate PJM will buy an extra 27,245 gigawatt-hours, equal to a 3000 MW power plant running full out for a year.

So PJM ends up with more capacity than they need.  Not a problem, right?  It's a good conservative engineering approach, reliability is maintained, and nobody's lights go out.

But this comes at a significant cost, say $1.3 billion over three years.  Not to mention building unnecessary infrastructure and propping up old coal plants that should retire.

Grid planners in Texas have likewise been criticized for predicting too much power demand.  In their twice-annual Capacity, Demand and Reserves (CDR) Report, ERCOT forecasts expected reserves for the next five years.

They have consistently overshot in their predictions of peak demand and underestimated the amount of new supply, according to the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power.

The Texas Industrial Energy Consumers group warned against putting too much faith in the forecasts.

"The CDR report systematically over projects reserve margin shortfalls that never materialize," they wrote in a filing in 2013. "The market does not believe these predictions and [the] Commission should not take drastic action in response to these reports.”

The debate about capacity markets has inevitably raised the question -- how much capacity do we need to buy?

Brattle Group, in an earlier report for the Texas PUC, tried to estimate the "economically optimal" margin for ERCOT. While engineers have traditionally used a rule of thumb of "one outage in ten years" -- in other words, where demand exceeds supply once in ten years and a blackout occurs -- Brattle questioned why that was the rule. 

They balanced the cost savings that come from building fewer power plants against the price suppression effects of having a lot of supply, and found the magic number to be 10.2%. 

"This risk-neutral, economically optimal reserve margin is substantially below the 14.1% reserve margin needed to meet the traditional 1-in-10 target," they wrote. 

Nevertheless, the annual savings that could be gained by dropping the margin 4% was an "only modest" $100 million, on an annual power bill of about $35 billion.

A few hundred million here, a few hundred million there -- pretty soon you're talking real money. And real enough to nearly double the annual energy efficiency programs of Texas utilities, which would increase reserve margins, clear the air, and save money for consumers.