Announcing Another Brilliant Young Intern at 2GreenEnergy

I’m pleased to announce the arrival of a brand new intern here at 2GreenEnergy; a big hearty welcome to Kevin, a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas.  Kevin majored in energy management and will be spending a few weeks performing research and writing reports that will help readers better understand how electricity markets function in the U.S.

Depending on which state you’re taking about, these laws can be downright byzantine, and California is probably the worst in the entire union. For decades here, each new administration that comes in has written laws that modify, rather than replace, the ones that came before, resulting in regulations that are many hundreds of pages long, and require extremely specialized (read: high billing rate) lawyers to make sense of them.  The rationale: those who write abstruse laws have advantages over competitors who struggle to understand them.

In any case, I was in the process of posing some suggested directions to Kevin via email, when I realized there is no reason not to publish them in the form of a blog post you’re reading right now.  I’m hoping he can elucidate things like:

• How the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) interacts with the public utility commissions (PUCs), and how this needs to change if we are to integrate more variable energy resources into our grid-mix.

• How the Trump administration’s Department of Energy (DoE) is attempting to force grid operators to buy more energy from coal, for example, given Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s (ridiculous) proposal to subsidize electricity plants that have huge amounts of fuel stored onsite. FERC laughed at him when he initially presented this, but are there any scenarios under which this or something like it might actually happen?

• How the coal-favoring EPA under Andrew Wheeler is shaping energy markets.

• How energy storage is changing the game.  For instance, how does the mandate that the providers of storage be compensated for the value they bring to grid stability, frequency regulation and wave form management provide additional incentive to bring more storage online?

• How the presence of additional vehicles can have a positive influence on the “duck curve” (large midday energy supply ) by absorbing solar electricity.

• The latest development in smart grid and smart cities, and how they affect energy markets.

• What the American Petroleum Institute (API, huge oil industry lobbying group) has been able to accomplish vis-a-vis renewable energy and electric transportation.

We all look forward to seeing what Kevin comes up with there.

Again, welcome!