• FEATURE STORY:  Chicago co-op's pilot real-time pricing leads to savings

• Supreme Court puts Prop 80 back on the ballot in Calif

Supreme Court puts Prop 80
back on the ballot in Calif

The California Supreme Court and the lower Appeals Court don't see eye-to-eye on what to do with flawed ballot issues.
     The appeals court ruled last week that if a proposition such a #80 is flawed on its face that it should be struck from the ballot.
     That's a lot smarter than letting the public vote on a misleading measure thinking it’s going to do what it won't.
     California's esteemed Supreme Court late yesterday reversed the decision thus putting the TURN Proposition 80 back on the ballot ...

Louisiana debate rages over C&I competition

A report from the Center for Energy Studies at Louisiana State started the debate over whether large customers should be able to shop in the state.
     Its author David Dismukes testified to the benefits last week at the PSC’s hearing on the matter (RT, 4/20).
     Dismukes, the Large Energy Users Group, Wal-Mart and a handful of competitive suppliers are aligned against Entergy and Southwestern Electric Power who oppose choice and say the savings would be minimal and costs high (RT, 1/21).
     Yet industrial power rates are the highest in the Southeast, choice advocates argued (RT, 2/21) ...

Records, records everywhere
but power (mostly) stays on

Small-scale power outages were reported in Maryland, the nation's capital and Virginia while TVA set big records twice this week with a whopping demand for 31,703 mw on Monday then 31,935 the next day.
     The week's long heat wave across much of the US has spiked electricity demand to record levels, according to EEI. For the week ending July 23, generators supplied 95,259 gwh, bettering the old record by more than 5%.
     US utilities cranked out a record 90,468 gigawatt hours last week beating the 90,468-gwh record set in August 2002, EEI reports.
     PJM broke an eight-day record for peak demand ...

Maryland’s C&I market is bustling

Suppliers lured more than 22,000 customers to shop in the last month, the PSC reported.
     Market-based rates for most customers help, along with POLR rules that now force large C&Is at three of four IOUs to shop if they don’t want to pay hourly rates.
     The exception is Allegheny Power.
     POLR rates are based on PJM’s hourly LMP and apply to customers who use more than 600 kwh ...

Saving 1% makes a big difference
in dollars at GM

Al Hildreth spends $1 billion/year on power and heating, he said, and only 1% of General Motors’s budget but “a lot of money” all the same, he told the US Combined Heat & Power Assn last week.
     In the ’80s, putting in a cogen unit meant a fight with the utility, Hildreth, staff engineer for GM Utilities Services, said.
     Though the firm has a relatively small process steam load, he still sees chances to save GM money on its energy costs by matching steam needs with power needs and building DG.
     Hooking up GM’s Pontiac North site -- a 26-mw fluidized bed combustion (FBC) boiler -- back in the ’80s meant a battle but by the 1990s when GM wanted to put in 3-mw and 7-mw combustion turbines with heat recovery in Southeast Michigan, it was able to work with the utility ...

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