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Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Energy Conservation Program (yahoo.com)
mdsolar sends news that the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a 6-2 ruling in favor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's ability to create incentives for conserving energy and reducing demand on the power grid at peak times.
The demand response program pays large electricity customers like retailers, schools and office buildings to reduce energy consumption on hot summer days and other times of peak demand. The reduction in power use means electric utilities don't need to turn on backup power plants, which cost more to run and boost electricity prices. ... The rule won wide praise from environmental groups because it curbed the need for utilities to build expensive and air-polluting power plants. The demand response program saved customers in the mid-Atlantic region nearly $12 billion in 2013, according to PJM Interconnection, which manages the wholesale power supply for all or part of 13 states. ... But the rule has meant millions in lost profits for utilities. Those companies argued that the program impermissibly targets retail customers.
The reduction in power use means electric utilities don't need to turn on backup power plants, which cost more to run and boost electricity prices
Have these people ever heard of a thing called "free market", where one can sell and buy? If the prices are too high, the stores and other places should feel them as well, and if the stores have made super great contracts (for the stores) with the energy companies, then its the companie's fault if they now have to pay the bill. The state regulating what should happen and what shouldn't happen is socialism. And I'm saying this while living in "socialist" europe.
without some damn Republican scam making them uncomfortable.
There is more about the ruling here http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
Ever noticed that when these companies want to protected their interests they say something along the lines of how badly it will hurt someone else:
Press: So Mr PR guy, what is your companies reaction to having this highly profitable but damaging line of business made illegal?
PR guy: Oh we are fine with losing billions in revenue, we've always known it was an unfair monopoly. What we are concerned about is that this will cause millions of cute puppies to die. We don't understand why the government is so intent on killing millions of cute puppies.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Where does it apply and how our we being exploited?
But the rule has meant millions in lost profits for utilities. Those companies argued that the program impermissibly targets retail customers.
They should have argued that it was a "taking" and the government had to reimburse them for their losses.
The tail end of the Fifth Amendment reads:
and the Supremes have already ruled that new laws and regulations, and changes to existing ones, that suck part of the value out of property (in this case, the value of the power generation and transmission infrastructure, which is based on the profit it creates) constitute a "partial taking" and require the government to pay for what it took.
Getting the Supremes to recognize that a rule change which imposes a change in the flow of money from customers to the investors in a busines can constitute a fifth amendment taking of the value of the latter's investment would inhibit arbitrary economic winner-picking regulations and move the US economy away from Fascism (alias "crony capitalism) and toward (free-market) Capitalism.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Justice Alito recused himself. Makes the point that stock ownership is political. Harvard President should take note and divest from fossil fuels. This is especially acute owing to Harvard taking up an Academic Honor code. http://slashdot.org/journal/25...
Governor Brian Sandavol has sold out the people.
He still votes in favor of Warren Buffet's NV Enegy, and not liberty for the people.
And wondered whether it is in people's interest to face electricity tariffs that may vary widely (by a factor of 10 at least, and without warning, like on a stock exchange) between the 15-min time slots in which electric power tends to be bought and sold?
Because that's what would be needed to remove one of the biggest imperfections in the electricity market: fixed consumer tariffs.
Allowing regulatory bodies to incentivise reduced consumption when generation costs go up is actually the simplest, most pragmatic way to remove some of the imperfections from the market. And it *demonstrably* results in quite substantial savings for customers.
Only ... it tends to cost power companies money, which is why they opposed this commonsense measure by legal means, and lost even when they tried to dress up their self-serving objections as "opposition to measures that interfere with the free-market".
Funny how this kind of dogwhistle tactics always brings the more dogmatic "free market" supporters out of the woodwork. Supporters who are clueless about anything to do with the issue at hand (including the market in which the issue arose), but but who are consistently full of empty slogans and over-simplistic arguments.
This definitely huts the little guy. I was already on a shutdown program with my energy company that allowed them to cut the power to the air conditioned during peak times of heavy usage for a generous 15% discount off my bill. With the guv'ment over-regulating once again and making shut-downs mandatory the energy company will simply strip my discount for the sake of their bottom line.
Those companies argued that the program impermissibly targets retail customers.
I have to at least partially agree with that argument - Why the hell can't I cash in this, since my home demand curve almost exactly reverses the grid demand curve?
Because that's what would be needed to remove one of the biggest imperfections in the electricity market: fixed consumer tariffs.
Consumers have a demand for planability, and if they turn on the dishwasher it shouldn't cause a hundred dollar bill, while the next time they can heat their house with electricity and its still a few dollars, this isn't something a consumer wants. They want to stay warm all the time and get their dishes washed all the time. So there is no "imperfection" here, just a special kind of demand. The energy producers either offer tarriffs with fixed prices, or they can offer tariffs with added price variation but lower prices in total if used smartly. They can offer it, and as long as the alternative is still provided, and not everybody is required to use a "smart" tariff which includes a spyware "smart" electricity meter, I have no problem with this.
And, there is even a much bigger "imperfect" constant: The network frequency. The network is built so that if you turn on a light somewhere, somewhere else a plant has to do the additional work. The thing that would change/vary if demanded != provided energy is the network frequency. And due to multiple reasons, it is tried to be kept constant. As the consumers can basically turn on their devices whenever they want, the producers have to account for it. Multiple systems have been put in place in order to keep the frequency inside safe bounds, like the rotational momentum of the moving parts of the generators in the power plants (for the fast-response changes), or plants that stay ready and can be turned on within minutes if the demand raises.
None of these two things would level out "imperfect"nesses of the market, the market has already found fine solutions for both cases.
And it *demonstrably* results in quite substantial savings for customers.
So you care about the market, or about the customers?
If a proposed law is advertised as "Energy Conservation Program", then its clear that it isn't intended to level out market imperfections. Yes, externeralities exist for every market, but if you want to internalize the cost then you should clearly label it that way, and not give it some bolshevik slogan. Your goal should be to find the factors you want to internalize, not to conserve energy, whatever this means. Energy can't be "conserved" either way, its against the law of energy preservation.
Those republicans have used uncomfortable temperatures for years to keep kids from learning and to make life more difficult for teachers.
They think the free market is a magic bullet. Any market ever has had some interference somewhere so these nutcases can always fall back and claim a true free market could still theoretically work despite all the empirical evidence against it.
The problem to some is that they only look at profits alone. The "substantial savings to customers" is not a concept they want to accept, as they think customers can reduce costs merely by buying from someone else. The government has a vested interest in reducing energy usage despite the loss in profits to some companies, but free market believers don't like externalities because it screws up their naive models. Almost everybody in America gets only one choice of electricity provider, take it or leave it, there is no free market by its very nature. And those utilities will fight viciously against anything that brings in competition (like municipal utilities).
They are alwyas generating hot air to pump into schools.
It is not that they think it is a magic bullet. It is that they know they can profit off the imperfect market. The imperfect market is usually one in which money perpetuates more money, and so if you have money and do not understand the concept that we all benefit when we all play fair, then you are prone to join the free market is a magic bullet bandwagon.
Doggy-matic
The US Supreme Court, USSC, also known as the Supremes, settles in favor of another Bureaucracy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission!
Ha ha
When the "chips are down" and the "sperm is a'spertin" the USSC favors the Penis.
A no brainer in the Stock Market world old boy.
Ha ha
One of the reasons schools aren't year round here is because AC is quite expensive to run during the Summer months when it's 105f outside :|
So to save money, they shut off the AC during those months. They save all sorts of $ on electricity, but the heat coupled with the humidity makes a perfect breeding ground for mold.
Is why the school smells so lovely when it starts back up. The cleaning staff has barely had time to bleach everything and wipe it down before everyone comes back.
Want to see some serious shit ? Call OSHA out to inspect a school about a month before it reopens. It's unlikely it will open at all once they've done their thing.
troubles of those Started wor2k on lubRication. You is the group that
Scalia and Thomas dissenting; go figure.
said. 'screaming
Demand response does not force a generator to not run. Instead it is the realtime price posted by the ISO. If a generators cost is $150/mw to run and the ISO is offering $100, the gen won't run.
Demand response just let's retailers/schools/industrial users cut back their usage when prices are through the roof. There is a very robust capacity auction and day ahead market that most generators take advantage of to ensure payment even if they do not run. For those units that do not participate they are competing against demand response and $2 natural gas. This is free market capitalism at its best IMO. (Disclaimer I trade electricity futures for a living)
If saving money was not incentive enough, giving money will not help. Kind of ironic, by government entities using less power, it saves tax payers money, by rewarding them for using less power, it will cost tax payer money. In the end the tax payer is most likely losing money in the deal.
Politicians got to buy those votes though.
Be wary of that word Republican, it may not mean the same thing everywhere. Here it's an anti-monarchy movement.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Certainly makes the case for people being able to generate their own power with a choice of utilities as a back up.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
There's a concept called "decoupling" - where a utility's profit is not based on the amount of power sold, but on other factors. (Say, reliability, low cost, customer satisfaction, etc). Many utilities do this, via their local regulating body of government.
With that in place, the utility doesn't care how much (or little) power you use - at least on a profit level. If the government offers a bonus to the utility for successfully implementing "green" power or a Demand Response system, then there's a lot of incentive for the utility to make that happen.
This isn't rocket surgery. Utilities are just like any other company. So many people have already decided that utilities are evil that they can't see how a small change to the rules can be good for everyone.
It makes the case, but that is hardly an overwhelming counter-argument. Huge numbers of electricity customers, possibly even a majority, cannot avail themselves to this. For instance: renters cannot typically put solar panels on the roof of their landlord's structure; the electrical demand for a large building is much larger than the available renewables can provide. The capital costs of self-generation - such as diesel generators or natural gas fuel cells - is quite high, and most folks simply are not cut out to manage that kind of machinery.
It's an option for some - and an increasing number of folks are availing themselves to it. This ought to be a concern for utilities generally, and for anyone who utilizes the grid (and pays for it) in any fashion.
Don't forget that the grid operators and massive energy companies want to limit your ability to make it financially work anyway. They jack the prices up as high as government regulation will allow, which causes increasing numbers of customers to switch to on-premises generation (solar, etc.), and then they whine to the PUC about how the rest of the ratepayers are picking up their bill for still being tied to the grid, even though the guy who just got panels on his roof is paying a PUC-mandated grid-tie fee. They oppose net metering at every chance. They spend loads of money lobbying politicians to put in place nonsense laws to prevent people from being able to save money and reduce environmental damage at the same time. See: Nevada.
They do everything they can to make it so the 'free market' doesn't work for anyone but them, by making it anything but free. And they have the resources to convince the useful idiots out there that it's a good thing, so that they will continue making an unprecedented amount of noise.
If the free market is all that, why are these grid operators so afraid of it being allowed to function? If the grid-tie fee isn't sufficient to maintain the grid, why aren't you lobbying the local PUC to raise that, rather than employing anti-competitive tactics in order to continue siphoning money from everyone's wallets at the highest possible speed?
Below this post: grousing about solar subsidy, etc. Never mind all the fossil subsidy out there for the last 100 years, we'll just hand-wave that away because it all of a sudden doesn't count. Never mind the biggest externalized cost of fossil energy: not having to deal with what blows out the stack into the air we all breathe, and the tens of thousands of respiratory ailments / deaths it causes every year. And all that is without even touching anything in the same time zone as climate change.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I'm hugely in favor of free markets, but I feel compelled to point out that even with these rules, it's still a free market. Changing incentives doesn't make a market not free. The incentives distort the market, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Intervening in markets should not be done on a whim, but in some cases it is the best option.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Interference does not necessarily prevent a market from being free. It distorts the markets, but free market != totally unregulated market. Price controls would make a market not free, but incentives (based on changing the flow of money to/from government) are different.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
In practice, decoupling means that the power company charges you whatever they want, and they will use that economic leverage to penalize you for being efficient in your use of power. You used 10% less kwh last month by investing in LED bulbs? So sorry, we're going to have to charge you more on your bill, and you can't stop us!
They gain the ability to do this from strategic "campaign contributions" and "charity donations".
That is the reality of decoupling. When power company employees discuss it, it's horrifying - the bosses literally rub their hands in glee at the idea that they can charge customers whatever the corrupt local politicians will permit, regardless of the value of any goods and services the customer receives. It's a truly extreme moral hazard. Don't let it happen in your state.
> Allowing regulatory bodies to incentivise reduced consumption when generation costs go up is actually the simplest, most pragmatic way to remove some of the imperfections from the market.
I'm trying to figure out how increased retail costs during peak load periods, which pretty much every utility does, public and private, doesn't incentivise (sic) reduced consumption.