Electric Light & Power articles from December 2002

Electric Light & Power archives from December 2002

Con Edison takes top honors by sticking to the basics.(receives Electric Light & Power's annual Utility of the Year award)(Interview)(Company Profile)
December 1, 2002... When other utilities were venturing into diverse, unregulated businesses, Consolidated Edison Inc. (Con Edison) continued its conservative "wires and pipes" approach to sustaining financial strength. This philosophy has served the company--and...

Calling for a timeout. (Commentary).
December 1, 2002... When you start reading this, visualize the hand symbol for a timeout. I'm officially going to wander along several tangents, some directly related to our industry, most not. We're heading into a new year, which from where I'm sitting...

Peoples acquires Texas reserves. (Companies).(Peoples Energy Production buys reserves in Texas from subsidiary of Magnum Hunter Resources Inc. )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Peoples Energy announced that its oil and gas production subsidiary, Peoples Energy Production, has purchased an interest in five properties in south Texas and the upper Texas gulf coast area from a subsidiary of Magnum Hunter Resources Inc.,...

Calpine, Florida Municipal sign agreement. (Projects and Contracts).(Calpine Corp. enters into 5-year power sales agreement with Florida Municipal Power Agency)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Calpine Corp. has entered into a five-year power sales agreement with the Florida Municipal Power Agency (FMPA). The agreement begins with a 35 MW commitment in 2005, ramping up to 75 MW in 2006 and 100 MW for the remaining three years of the...

Duke Energy's patriot receives approval. (Projects and Contracts).(Duke Energy Gas Transmission gets approval to build Patriot natural gas pipeline)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued Duke Energy Gas Transmission authorization to construct and operate the company's Patriot natural gas pipeline project The approval, in the form of the issuance of a certificate of public...

Study shows negative impact on power industry. (Projects and Contracts).(natural gas generators to find it difficult to be profitable and attracting investment will be hard for power firms)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... A new economic assessment of the Midwest power markets entitled "A Guide to Winning in the Wholesale Power Markets--Generation, Fuel, Transmission: Volume I, The Midwest," co-authored by Hill & Associates of Annapolis Maryland and BlueWave...

CP&L. (Executive Appointments).(Hilda Pinnix-Ragland will be regional vice president)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Regional vice president Jim Massengill is retiring. Hilda Pinnix-Ragland, current vice president of energy delivery services, will be promoted to lead the region.

Duke Energy. (Executive Appointments).(Fred Fowler is president and COO)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Fred Fowler is president and COO.

Washington Group. (Executive Appointments).(Terry K. Eller is corporate vice president of investor relations )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Terry K. Eller, formerly associate general counsel, has been named corporate vice president of investor relations.

ALSTOM. (Executive Appointments).(Patrick Kron is CEO)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Patrick Kron will succeed Pierre Bilger as CEO.

Dynegy. (Executive Appointments).(Bruce A. Williamson is president and CEO )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Bruce A. Williamson named president and CEO.

FERC branches out to energy market oversight and investigations. (View from the Top).(interview with William F. Hederman, Jr., director of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's new Office of Market Oversight and Investigations)(Interview)
December 1, 2002... Earlier this year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) opened up a new branch labeled the Office of Market Oversight and Investigations (OMOI). OMOI's function, according to FERC, is to help the commission "improve its understanding...

Got a date with a judge? CCA can help you prepare. (View from the Top).(Communication Counsel of America)(Interview)
December 1, 2002... "Ken Lay could have really used your services," I joked while interviewing Nancie Poppema, executive vice president for the Communication Counsel of America. She laughed and added, "We've heard that a lot recently. After the scandal broke,...

FERC Standard Market Design: restoring momentum to deregulation. (Executive Insights).
December 1, 2002... The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Standard Market Design (SMD) Notice of Rule Making (NOPR) is best described as a "back to the basics" initiative that is intended to restore deregulation momentum in the United States and all of...

Security's bottom line: knowledgeable electrical engineers can cause blackouts. (Guest Commentary).(Tony Sleva)
December 1, 2002... Editor's note: Sleva contacted EL&P in response to our Sept. cover article "Power security in a bottle: Who pays for the safety salve?" His short note--included here as a sidebar--intrigued us, and we offered him this guest commentary forum to...

Benefit of counsel: Standard Market Design -- snake oil or a silver bullet? (News).(FERC's Appendix E for Standard Market Design to prevent future use of Enron's trading strategies)
December 1, 2002... Last month, we discussed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) staff's initial response to Enron's trading strategies. Another issue is how markets can be reformed to discourage those strategies which took advantage of flaws existing...

U.S. consumers less aware of energy issues. (News).(survey finds consumer awareness of electric deregulation dips for first time in 5 years)
December 1, 2002... Consumer awareness of electric deregulation took a dip for the first time in five years according to the results of our recently released 2002 Deloitte & Touche Consumer Awareness Survey of Electric Deregulation. This was our fourth annual...

Raising capital in an unforgiving market. (Finance).
December 1, 2002... Given the ongoing quagmire of problems in the energy sector, member firms are employing a wide array of methods in order to raise much-needed capital. Bankruptcies, credit downgrades and scandals have all but stifled traditional capital-raising...

Debt abyss spurs increased scrutiny of management. (Finance).
December 1, 2002... Throughout 2002, Miller McConville & Co. has continued to raise serious concerns regarding the mounting energy debt crisis and significant management problems in the U.S. power and gas industry. The firm has been critical of industry management...

WSI issues winter forecast for energy traders. (Electric & Gas Trading).
December 1, 2002... WSI Corp. issued the winter forecast for the upcoming three-month period (December to February). WSI expects the period to be cooler-than-normal in the eastern third of the U.S., as well as in the southern and central plains (e.g., Phoenix,...

Northeast wholesale prices expected to remain low. (Electric & Gas Trading).
December 1, 2002... The wholesale price of electricity in the Northeast is low compared to historical levels and is expected to stay that way for several years to come according to Henwood's recently released study of Northeast electricity and gas markets. ...

NEPOOL jump-starts Generation Information certificates. (Electric & Gas Trading).
December 1, 2002... APX, a provider of transaction processing services for the electric power industry, recently announced that the New England Power Pool (NEPOOL) Generation Information System (GIS) has created a total of 63 million electricity generation...

Florida Power offers new services to customers through partnership with Allconnect. (Electric & Gas Trading).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Florida Power now offers a new range of services for new residential customers and for customers moving within the company's service territory through a partnership with Allconnect, a company that assists consumers in selecting and ordering...

Lattice transmission tower analysis moves beyond the simple truss model. (Transmission & Distribution).
December 1, 2002... The method of analysis for transmission line towers has advanced since the use of graphically procedures. Before the advent of the computer, the transmission engineer used graphical analysis developed to a professional art for determining...

Existing and potential constraints within ERCOT. (Transmission & Distribution).
December 1, 2002... Since Texas opened its electricity market to competition in January 2002, a major part of a successful restructuring operation has been transmission lines--how many there are and if there's enough transmission capacity to meet changing...

Visualizing the electric grid for power management and marketing. (Transmission & Distribution).
December 1, 2002... The electric power system is now one of the largest and most complex of manmade objects, with billions of components, tens of millions of kilometers of transmission line, thousands of generators, and power outputs ranging from under 100 kW to...

How do the recent trends in mobile computing apply to utilities? (Information Technology Customer Systems).
December 1, 2002... As businesses continue to emphasize and require anytime-anywhere access to corporate information, we see more enterprise applications with wireless components enabling far more than email exchange. And it's all easier to use and deploy....

But is it working? How to properly monitor call centers. (Information Technology Customer Systems).
December 1, 2002... You may ask, "What is calibration and why do I need it?" To properly answer the question, let's talk first about your call monitoring program. Why do you need a monitoring program? You have your customer service representatives (CSRs) in...

Fuel cells growing into viable power option. (Technology).
December 1, 2002... These days, news about fuel cells can often be found throughout the media, from The Wall Street Journal to Country Living Magazine. However, the science behind the fuel cell is relatively new to most people, and it can be difficult to follow...

SIS builds on Siemens Westinghouse. (Tech Briefs).(Siemens Industrial Services)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Siemens Energy & Automation announced a reorganized and refocused national industrial services organization called Siemens Industrial Services. The new name replaces the former Siemens Westinghouse Technical Services and signifies a...

GE to acquire Jenbacher. (Tech Briefs).
December 1, 2002... GE Power Systems announced plans to acquire Jenbacher A.G. Jenbacher A.G., headquartered in Jenbach, Austria, manufactures gas fueled reciprocating engines and generator sets for power generation applications, and also works in cogeneration and...

ALSTOM awarded contract. (Tech Briefs).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... ALSTOM has been awarded a contract worth over 162 million euros (approximately $162,488,490 U.S.) by Santee Cooper, South Carolina's state-owned electric and water utility, to supply a 640 MW sub-critical pulverized coal-fired utility boiler to...

Plug Power delivers system. (Tech Briefs).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Plug Power Inc. announced the availability of the company's first direct-hydrogen fuel cell system designed to provide extended outage coverage for critical industrial operations. The 5 kW, 48 V, D.C., hydrogen-fueled system will support...

American Superconductor meets goal way ahead of schedule. (Tech Briefs).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... American Superconductor Corp., a supplier of superconductor products and power electronic converters for the electric power industry, recently stated that they have achieved "reproducible results" in electrical performance over 10 meter lengths...

AEP dedicates sodium sulfur battery. (Tech Briefs).(American Electric Power)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... American Electric Power (AEP) and a team of partners have dedicated a stationary sodium sulfur battery at the AEP office park in Columbus, Ohio. According to AEP, this batter is the first U.S. stationary sodium sulfur battery. Partners in the...

Basin Electric unveils wind project. (Tech Briefs).
December 1, 2002... Basin Electric Cooperative and FPL Energy LLC have reached an agreement to build an 80 MW wind energy project, with 40 MW in each of the Dakotas. The agreement calls for Basin Electric to purchase the output of the projects, which will be...

Canadian Clean coal attracts investment. (Tech Briefs).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... The Canadian Clean Power Coalition (CCPC) announced the full participation of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the International Energy Agency's (IEA) Greenhouse Gas R&D and Clean Coal Centre Programmes in the feasibility study...

Mass Megawatts product chosen. (Tech Briefs).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Winrock Financial Services, Ltd., a South American leader of environmental causes, has chosen Mass Megawatt's "Multi-Axis Turbosystem" (MAT) to provide 25 megawatts of power capacity at the company's titanium processing facility near Puerto...

Southern Co. partners with National Wild Turkey Federation. (Tech Briefs).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... Southern Company has signed an agreement with the National Wild Turkey Federation to support the Federation's Energy for Wildlife program, a membership-based certification program for utility and energy companies with the primary goal of...

Communicate on all levels. (Management Methods).(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... There is often a disparity between what people say and what they indicate on a nonverbal level. Real communication between people includes more than words alone. It includes, for example, what is not said--facial expressions, vocal inflections,...

Give instructions in small doses. (Management Methods).
December 1, 2002... When you have complex instructions to When give, particularly to inexperienced workers, don't overwhelm them by explaining everything at once. Explain one portion at a time, making sure the employee understands it before you go on to the next...

Calendar events.
December 1, 2002... COMING IN 2003 Jan. 14-16 POWER-GEN India & Central Asia PennWell Confs. & Exhibitions (+44/1992-656-629) www.power-genindia.com New Delhi, India Feb. 4-6 DistribuTECH 2003 PennWell Confs. & Exhibitions...

Primer on LMP. (Power Pointers).(locational marginal pricing)
December 1, 2002... Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP) is a methodology for pricing electricity and managing transmission congestion that has been used by PJM and NY-ISO, and is likely to be adopted across the U.S. by Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) such...

People. Presence. Proximity. (Bulletin Board: Advertisement).
December 1, 2002... Mitsubishi Power Systems' dedicated Americas Service Center brings a "world of service" a half-world closer. Discover our new in-hemisphere resource for OEM-style turbine repair and component manufacturing; remote monitoring and...

Solve Gas Conditioning Challenges With Spraying Systems Co. (Bulletin Board: Advertisement).
December 1, 2002... Spraying Systems Co., the leading provider of spray nozzle systems, offers many options for improving your gas conditioning processes and your bottom line. Whether its S02 removal or NOx control, higher performance begins with our more than...

The America's Mitsubishi. Powering Ahead.
December 1, 2002... Mitsubishi Power Systems is your new HQ for Mitsubishi power generating technologies, engineering, sales and service in the Americas. For a comprehensive overview of advanced combustion-, steam- and combined-cycle power systems; in-hemisphere...