White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Crime, War and Mischief Are the Internet Norms

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By Llewellyn King

The big news coming out of the G7 meeting in Japan will not be about establishing international norms for cybersecurity. That will only get an honorable mention at best. But maybe it should get greater attention: the threat is real and growing.

Consider just these four events of the recent past:

The electric grid in Ukraine was brought down last Dec. 23 by, it is believed, the Russians. Because of its older design, operators were able to restore power with manual overrides of the computer-controlled system.

The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles was ransomed. This crime takes place when a hacker encrypts your data and demands a ransom, often in untraceable bitcoin, to unlock it. The hospital paid $17,000 rather than risk patients and its ability to operate.

While these ransom attacks are fairly common, this is the first one believed to have been launched against a hospital. Previously hospitals had thought patient records and payment details were what hackers would want, not control of the operating systems. Some of the ransoms are as low as $3,000, with the criminals clearly betting that the victims would lose much more by not settling immediately, as did the medical center. The extortionists first asked for $3.6 million.

In a blockbuster heist on the Internet, the Bangladesh central bank was robbed of $81 million. The crooks were able to authorize the Federal Reserve of New York to release the money held in an account there. They would have got away with another $860 million, if it were not for a typing mistake. In this case, the money was wired to fraudulent accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Target, the giant retailer, lost millions of customer records, including credit card details, to an attack in February 2014. Since then, these attacks on retailers to get data have become common. Hackers sell credit card details on what is known as the “black web” to other criminals for big money.

Often the finger is pointed at China, which will not be at the G7. While it may be a perpetrator, it also has victim concerns. There is no reason to think that Chinese commerce is not as vulnerable as that in the West.

China, with the help of the Red Army, is blamed in many attacks, particularly on U.S. government departments. But little is known of attacks Chinese institutions sustain.

Governments want to police the Internet and protect their commerce and citizens, but they are also interested in using it in cyberwar. Additionally, they freely use it in the collection of intelligence and as a tool of war or persuasion. Witness U.S. attempts to impede the operation of the centrifuges in Iran and its acknowledged attacks on the computers of ISIS.

As the Net’s guerilla war intensifies, the U.S. electric utility industry, and those of other countries, is a major source of concern, especially since the Ukraine attack. Scott Aaronson, who heads up the cybersecurity efforts of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for private utilities, says the government’s role is essential, and the electric companies work closely with the government in bracing their own cyber defenses.

Still, opinions differ dramatically about the vulnerability of the electric grid.

These contrasting opinions were on view at a meeting in Boston last month, when two of the top experts on cybersecurity took opposing views of utility vulnerability. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security who now teaches emergency management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said she believed the threat to the electric grid was not severe. But Mourad Debbabi, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who also has had a career in private industry, thinks the grid is vulnerable — and that vulnerability goes all the way down to new “smart meters.”

The fact is that the grid is the battleground for what Aaronson calls “asymmetrical war” where the enemy is varied in skill, purpose and location, while the victims are the equivalent of a standing army, vigilant and vulnerable. No amount of government collaboration will stop criminals and rogue non-state players from hacking out of greed, or malice, or just plain hacker adventurism.

Governments have double standards, exempting themselves when it suits from the norms they are trying to institutionalize. Cyber mischief and defending against it are both big businesses, and the existential threat is always there. — For InsideSources

Misadventures of Howard Hughes Can Teach Electric Utilities

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By Llewellyn King

Howard Hughes, a pioneer in movie making and aviation (which informed his cantilevered underwire bra design for actress Jane Russell), was blindsided by disruptive technology. Electric utilities might want to heed Hughes’s history as they deal with future shock.

Hughes believed that his 1930 silent movie “Hell’s Angels” — which has some of the finest flying sequences ever shot — could make it even as the age of talkies was dawning. But he was in error; he had remake the movie with a sound track at huge expense.

Something similar happened to Hughes with the H-4 Hercules, the giant, wooden flying boat — nicknamed the “Spruce Goose” by the press — which he built during World War II. Eight reciprocating engines were no match for the potential offered on the horizon by jet engines. And spruce was no match for the superior aluminum alloys that had been developed during the war.

Leaders in the electric utility industry know full well that times are changing. But are they making brilliant silent movies when the talkies are around the corner, so to speak?

Dealing with change is especially hard for utilities because they are in a real-time business. The juice must flow 24-7, which means the new has to integrate seamlessly with the old. Shutting down to retool, as Hughes did with “Hell’s Angels,” is not an option.

Yet in the 46 years that I’ve been writing about the utility industry, I’ve never seen such upheaval, ergo such challenges. There is no aspect of the industry which isn’t beset by technology at the gate: computing and artificial intelligence; drones for line surveillance and security; 3D printing (additive manufacturing) for repairs; superior data from smart meters; and aggressive growth from competitors on the roof – in the form of solar panels — and in the marketplace.

But, to my mind, the most-daunting challenge facing the industry is flat or declining electric demand. For investor-owned utilities, which provide 80 percent of the nation’s electricity, this challenge, this reality has been masked by the good performance of their stocks on Wall Street, which owes a lot to low interest rates and volatility in the market, not to the long-term prospects for investor-owned companies. For now, it is the utility paradox.

The industry, through the Edison Electric Institute, has built a superb lobbying arm that can seek legislative remedies for its troubles — as it did when dividends were under attack. But there are no legislative fixes for an industry in market turmoil, abetted by technological disruption.

There is more hope for relief from regulators. Increasingly, the industry is focused on state commissions: it wants relief from the downside of rooftop solar; relief from intrusive and misleading marketers of solar products; and, above all, protection of the grid’s existing infrastructure.

Additionally, not all technology is disruptive. Utility solar farms are an economic and technological success. Storage is attracting innovators and may yet get a breakthrough. There is the hope that new load may come through electric vehicles — although growth there could be stunted by cheap oil. It behooves the industry to push for better recharging, particularly inductive charging, and to advertise more electric consumption as a remedy for air pollution from the automobile tailpipe.

In 1974, I worked with the then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the late Dixy Lee Ray, on an energy study for President Richard Nixon. The study advocated more electrification of transportation – and we had railroads in mind first and foremost. The United States has a few miles of electrified railway in the Midwest and the Amtrak corridor from Washington to Boston – far less electrified railway than other developed countries.

The railroads got away from the electric utilities, and they won’t be corralled now. But there is a powerful environmental and social case for electrifying cars; creating a moral imperative to drive electric, if refueling is solved — and I don’t mean hanging an extension cord out the kitchen window. South Korea has buses that refuel through induction-charging plates at bus stops; smaller batteries, frequent charging.

It will be a lot easier for utilities to argue for regulatory relief to protect their social and shareholder responsibilities if they are extending their social value. — For InsideSources

Wind of Change Challenging Utilities

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On Feb. 3, 1960 in Cape Town, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan shook up what was still the British Empire in Africa by telling the Parliament of South Africa that “the wind of change is blowing through this continent.”

His remarks weren’t well received by those who that thought it was premature, and that Britain would rule much of Africa for generations. The British ruling class in Africa – the established order — was shaken.

But Macmillan’s speech was, in fact, a tacit recognition of the inevitable. It was the signaling of a brave new world in which Britain would grant independence to countries from Nigeria to Botswana and Kenya to Malawi. Britain would not attempt to hold the Empire together. His speech was seminal, in that Britain had signaled that things would never ever be the same.

To me, the appearance of investor and entrepreneur Elon Musk at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual convention in New Orleans was a “wind of change” moment for the august electric utility. It was a signal that the industry was coming to terms, or trying to come to terms, with new forces that are challenging it as a business proposition in a way that it hasn’t been challenged in a history of more than 100 years.

But whereas Britain could swallow its pride and start a withdrawal from its former possessions, the electric industry faces quite a different challenge: How can it serve its customers and honor its compact with them when people like Musk, who is the non-executive chairman of the aggressive company SolarCity, and a passionate advocate of solar electricity, and Google are moving into the electric space?

At EEI’s annual convention, Musk didn’t tell his audience what he thought would happen to the utilities as their best customers opted to leave the grid, or to rely on it only in emergencies, while insisting that they should be allowed to sell their own excess generation back to the grid. Musk also didn’t venture an opinion on the future of the grid — and his interlocutor, Ted Craver, chairman and CEO of Rosemead, Calif.-based Edison International, didn’t press him.

Instead Musk talked glowingly about the electrification of transportation, implying — but not saying outright — that the electric pie would grow with new technologies like his Tesla Motors’ electric car.

The CEOs of EEI’s board were ready for the press by the time they held a briefing a day after Musk’s opening appearance. They spoke of “meeting the challenges as we have always met the challenges” and of “evolving” with the new realities. Gone from recent EEI annual meetings was CEO talk of their business model being “broken.”

The great dark cloud hanging over the industry is that of social justice. As the move to renewables becomes a flood, enthusiastically endorsed by such disparate groups as the Tea Party and environmentalists, the Christian right and morally superior homeowners, and companies like SolarCity and First Solar, the poor may have difficulty keeping their heads above water.

The grid, the lifeline of U.S. social cohesion, remains at threat. Utilities are jumping into the solar business, but they have yet to reveal how selling or leasing rooftop units — as the Southern Company is about to do in Georgia — is going to save the grid, or how the poor and city dwellers are going to be saved from having to pay more and more for the grid while suburban fat cats enjoy their sense that they’re saving the planet.

My sense is that in 10 years, things will look worse than they do today; that an ill wind of change will have reduced some utilities to the pitiful state of Amtrak — a transportation necessity that has gobbled up public money but hasn’t restored the glory days of rail travel.

People like myself — I live in an apartment building — have reason to fear the coming solar electric world, for we will be left out in the cold. The sun will not be shining on those of us who still need the grid. It needs to be defended. — This column was previously published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.

Washington Can’t Save the Utilities from the Solar Onslaught

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Time was when New York dominated the collective and individual efforts of the electric utility industry. When the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) was founded in 1933, there was no question but that it would be located in New York. Likewise the Atomic Industrial Forum, which has morphed into the Nuclear Energy Institute, was founded there in 1952.

At least one large utility, American Electric Power, had its headquarters on Wall Street. In the early 1970s, I would travel from Washington to New York to interview AEP’s legendary chairman, Donald C. Cook. He believed in coal, and as the one-and-only fuel for electric generation. So much so that he kept a large piece of it on his desk. It was big and shiny and luminously black. In a twist of irony, Cook is remembered by his company through its only nuclear plant being named after him.

Electric utilities believed they had to be in New York because that is where they had raised their money — and they had needed to raise enormous quantities of money from the time of the first power plant.

Many myths attended the raising of capital. One was that to keep up with the blistering pace of electric demand, 7.5 percent per year at the end of the 1960s and the beginning the 1970s, utilities would drain the capital markets; take all the available money. It was said that Britain could not privatize the Central Electricity Generating Board because there was not enough liquidity in the London market to afford such a giant offering. (In reality, the public offering was oversubscribed when it was listed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.)

It was clear by the 1970s, even before the energy crisis in the winter of 1973, that the U.S. government was going to be a bigger player in the future of the industry than the banks and investment houses. So gradually the trade associations moved to Washington, and the utilities moved their headquarters back into their service territories.

Washington was becoming all-important. It probably started with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which was interpreted by the courts as having wide application. This was a lesson learned by the nuclear industry when it claimed exemption from NEPA under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. No way, said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Afterward, the electric power industry realized that it had to be pro-active with legislation; it had to be in Washington and it had to lobby — and lobby hard.

The result has been that EEI, particularly under its well-liked president Tom Kuhn, has become one of the most effective trade association lobbying Congress. Its role was to prevent damaging legislation, to educate members of Congress, and to divert campaign funds to those who saw things its way.

Gradually, the whole industry came to look to Washington for redress; to ask for favors and stall damaging legislation. Its last great victory was in preserving dividends — so important to utility stockholders — from the taxman.

Now the industry is in a new crisis; a crisis that has arisen not because of policy, but of technology. Call it “the solar onslaught.”

The industry is fighting for its identity, its profitability, and its traditional role as the monopoly supplier of electricity. Solar rooftop installations are fraying the very fabric of the utilities and their business models and, for the first time in a long time, the powerful lobby that is EEI cannot help.

This is not a battle which will be fought in Washington. This is a state issue, and there are strange alliances ranged against the traditional utilities: the Tea Party with the greens, evangelicals with politically-correct Democrats.

Sadly, it is a battle in which the odds — as in journalism and telephony — are on the side of the new. Disruptive technology is at the gate. When rooftop solar is aligned with a really serviceable battery (the new Tesla offerings do not do the job yet), the utilities will feel like the makers of silent movies when the talkies came along.

The great star, Rudolph Valentino, did not survive the new technology. What of today’s utilities?  — This column was previously published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.

 

 

War on the Roof: Solar Power Is Encroaching

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A warning light is flashing for the nation's electric utilities — and it is getting more persistent.
 
The utilities, big and small, for- and not-for-profit, are facing serious disruptive technology. The old business models are in danger.
 
The unlikely disruptive technology that is causing the trouble is rooftop solar power.
 
Back in the energy turbulent 1970s, solar was a gleam in the eye of environmentalists who dared to dream of renewable energy. It looked like a pipe dream.
 
Very simple solar had been deployed to heat water in desert homes since indoor plumbing became the norm. Making electricity from the sun was many orders of magnitude more complex and it was, anyway, too expensive.
 
The technology of photovoltaic cells, which make electricity directly from the sun, needed work; it needed research, and it needed mass manufacturing. Hundreds of millions of dollars later in research and subsidies, the cost of solar cells has fallen and continues to go down.
 
Today, solar certainly is not a pipe dream: It is looking like a mature industry. It is also a big employer in the installation industry. It is a player, a force in the market.
 
But solar has created a crisis for the utilities.
 
In order to incubate solar, and to satisfy solar advocates, Congress said that these “qualifying facilities” should be able not only to generate electricity for homes when the sun is shining, but also to sell back the excess to the local utility. This is called “net metering” and it is at the center of the crisis today — particularly across the Southwest, where solar installations have multiplied and are being added at a feverish rate.
 
Doyle Beneby, CEO of San Antonio, Texas-based CPS Energy, the largest municipal electric and gas utility in the nation, said, “The homes that are installing solar quickly are the more affluent ones.” The problem here, he explained, is that the utility has to maintain the entire infrastructure of wires and poles and buy back electricity generated by solar in these homes at the highest prevailing rate — often more than power could be bought on the market or generated by the utility.
 
Steve Mitnik, a utility industry consultant, said that 47 percent of the nation's electric market is residential and the larger, affluent homes — which use a lot of electricity, and generally pay more as consumption rises — are a critically important part of it. Yet these are the ones that are turning to solar generation, and expect to make a profit selling excess production to the grid.
 
But who pays for the grid? According to CPS Energy's Beneby, and others in the industry, the burden of keeping the system up and running then falls on those who can least afford it.
 
The self-generating homes still need the grid not only to sell back to but ,more importantly, to buy from when the sun isn't shining and at night.
 
For some in the utility industry, net metering is just the beginning of a series of emerging problems, including:
 
  • Big investments are needed in physical security after the sniper attack last October at PG&E Corp.'s Metcalf transmission substation, which took out 17 huge transformers that provide power to California's Silicon Valley.
 
  • New investment is needed in cybersecurity.
 
  • Improved response to bad weather is a critical issue, especially in some Mid-Atlantic states.
 
Beneby believes the solar incursion into the traditional marketplace might be the beginning of more self-generation — such as home-based, micro-gas turbines — and utilities will and must adjust. He is something of a futurist and points out that in telephones, once a purely utility service, disruption has been hugely creative.
 
Environmentalists are as disturbed as the utilities. Some are calling the imposition of a surcharge on rooftop generators, as in Arizona recently, an attempt by the greedy utilities to stamp out competition. But many are seeking alternative solutions without a war over generating, and without punishing those unable to afford their own generation.
 
Brian Keane, president of SmartPower, a green-marketing group with solar-purchase programs in Arizona and many other states, has looked for cool heads to prevail on both sides of the issue. “I don't have an answer,” he said, calling for dialogue. Also the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group, has been talking with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
 
It isn't your father's electric utility anymore, or your hippie's solar power. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate




 

Disruptive Technology Hits Electric Industry

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If you are reading this by electric light, you are connected to the electric grid Unless, that is, you are one of an infinitesimal number of home owners who installed solar panels.
 
The penetration of solar panels may be statistically insignificant today, but to the electric industry these panels, and other self-generating schemes, are like dry rot: a threat to the whole edifice.
 
It is not just those panels that are beginning to disrupt the electrical grid, but the whole panoply of alternative technology; wind, geothermal heat, micro-hydro turbines and scattered natural gas turbines all fit into a new category of electric generation known as “distributed generation.”
 
The change is so threatening to the investor-owned electric utilities and their not-for-profit colleagues in the public power sector that it has begun to dominate discussions on the Web and wherever utility executives gather.
 
Early this year the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents the investor-owned utilities that provide 70 percent of U.S. electricity, issued a white paper discussing the disruptive changes that are beginning to threaten the old electric paradigm. The theme of change also dominated the EEI annual convention in San Francisco earlier this month, with CEOs talking about a “new business model,” although they were hard put to say what this will be.
 
The root cause of the problem is that the new entrants into generating treat the grid as kind of open marriage: there when it suits them. A home owner, might be self-sufficient in electricity, and even generate enough to sell a small portion back, to the grid 90 percent of the time; but during prolonged bad weather, or if the home system is down for maintenance, that home owner expects to flip a switch and go back on the grid. The local utility, all the while, has been standing by hoping to sell that home owner a few watts until the home system returns to power.
 
This applies even more so to large users of electricity, including factories and big retailers. Many of the factory customers generate nearly all of their own electricity already and big retailers are getting in the game. Walmart is covering its store roofs with solar cells. McDonalds has eyed self-generating for years, but not without the comforting assurance that the grid will always be there.
 
All of this distorts the financial as well as the physical infrastructure of the utility industry and produces social problems as well. Ted Craver, CEO of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, told the EEI conference that as California is “ground zero” for rooftop solar, you have to ask “are you creating a system of those who have means for self- generating and shifting the burden to the have-nots? It is a social fairness question.”
 
The system is also skewed, Craver noted, by subsidies for alternative generation. He called for a flexible system that allows for these new realities.
 
Another threat, according to Tom Fanning, CEO of the giant Southern Company, comes to the ability of utilities — one of the most capital-intensive industries is the world– to raise money. “Our industry raises about $90 billion a year and we need policies that support that,” he said.
 
There are other problems facing the electricity industry, which are cataloged in an amusing and readable book by economist Steven Mitnick, “Lines Down.” While Mitnick is more optimistic about the future of the grid than many, he says it needs fixing. It has been starved of investment and needs upgrading, particularly hardening against the storm outages that are standard in America but not in Europe, Japan and South Korea.
 
The future of the grid is not in the hands of the utilities alone, but also the regulators, federal and state, and politicians. That means that the new paradigm may be a long time in coming, while another aspect of the U.S. infrastructure deteriorates. — For the Hearst New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Technological Revolution So Great We Forget It

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What are the achievements of Western civilization?
 
The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the spread of democracy and a free press tower on the intellectual side of the ledger. But they didn't happen in a vacuum; they needed coincidental technological advances.
 
The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450, made the Enlightenment possible. Shaft horsepower, invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712 and developed by James Watt into a practical steam engine, enabled the Industrial Revolution to get off the ground and make the first great change in how people lived by substituting mechanical energy for human and animal energy.
 
For all the downsides of the Industrial Revolution, it was the dawn of the possibility of an improvement in the lives of most people. It hinted, even with the horrors of the exploitation of workers and miners by their employers, that life could be lived without relentless drudgery.
 
Recently Brian Wolff, senior vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, told security analysts in New York that the trade association is launching a campaign to celebrate the value of electricity.
 
Bravo and about time; for it is electricity that has done more to improve the livability of human life than any other product or service.
 
Electricity has many fathers, going back to 600 B.C., when Thales of Miletus wrote about static electricity. In 1600, the English scientist William Gilbert gave us the name “electricity,” derived from the Greek word for amber: Early experiments consisted of rubbing amber to produce static electricity.
 
Investigator after investigator added to the knowledge of electricity. In 1745, it was discovered that electricity was controllable and the first electrical capacitor, the Leyden jar, was invented.
 
Then came Benjamin Franklin, who popularized concepts of electricity with his key on the kite and his invention of the lightening rod. The first battery was invented by Alessandro Volta, who also proved that electricity can travel over wires, in 1800.
 
Technology moved way ahead in 1821, when the great English scientist Michael Faraday outlined the concept of the electric motor. Six years later another Englishman, Joseph Henry, built one of the first motors.
 
All of this paved the way for Thomas Edison, who founded the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. A year later, the first commercial power station opened in San Francisco and the first commercial arc lighting system was installed in Cleveland.
 
But it was Edison's demonstration of the incandescent light bulb in 1879 that raised the possibility that human life could get easier. From then on, electricity was deployed at an astounding rate; despite excursions and disputes, like those between Edison and George Westinghouse and Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla.
 
And what a boon electricity has been. It has made the home life safer, eliminating open flames for heat and light, and more convenient. At various times, as a boy in Africa, I lived in homes without electricity. It's not an experience that I'd voluntarily repeat – no light after dark to read by, little heating, no cooling and immense drudgery to heat water and build a cooking fire.
 
Electricity has effectively liberated women from the slavery of the home and given then an equal role in society, and has made life in inhospitable climates, including the U.S. South, agreeable. And it's enabled whole technological revolutions to take place: broadcasting, recorded music multistory building, computing, health, refrigeration, transportation and just about anything one can name.
 
Electricity is ubiquitous and the single-greatest contributor to our quality of life. In our fascinating with computer technology and the Internet, it is forgotten that it rests on an earlier harnessing of electrons by a plethora of scientists down the centuries.
 
Of all the things invented by the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing has been such a gift to humanity as electricity. It's appropriate that it should be celebrated and find a prominent place in the pantheon of human achievement.
 
Flip that switch and marvel. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Faces Its Own Guns

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s building on H Street in Washington glowers across Lafayette Park at the White House. It is a impersonal building, austere even, reminiscent of a British colonial post office.

 

With 3 million members, and the largest budget of any trade group in Washington, the chamber is a political force to be reckoned with, as is its hard-driving chief executive, Thomas Donohue.

 

Its stance is that American business is a kind of Gulliver, tied down by the Lilliputian strings of regulation and regressive public policy. Under Donohue, the chamber has relentlessly sought out threats to business, real and hypothetical. It opposes unions; regulation; government intrusion into markets; expansion of programs that cost tax dollars, which is all social programs; and raising the minimum wage. It is more ambivalent these days about health care. And Donohue can be quite capricious; for example, he has called for normalizing relations with Cuba.

 

Now the chamber is roiled as it seldom has been. The casus belli is climate change, and what a storm it has produced. Three large electric utilities have withdrawn from the chamber, accusing it of extremism in its stance on climate change. Sneaker giant Nike has resigned from the chamber’s board of directors in protest, but is still a member.

 

The utilities include Exelon, by some measures the largest utility; Pacific Gas & Electric, a giant in California; and PNM, the largest utility in New Mexico. As a percentage of membership, they do not affect the chamber much; but strategically, their rebuke means a great deal. They are the very constituency the chamber and Donohue are out to help. They burn coal as well as other fuels, and they are critically affected by what is to happen in climate legislation or regulation.

 

The utilities want Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation. If Congress fails to pass the legislation, they fear Environmental Protection Agency regulation. The stakes are high. The chamber is opposed to the present cap-and-trade legislation before Congress, and has challenged the science that would be used by the EPA.

 

“If Congress does not act, the EPA will and the result will be more arbitrary, more expensive and more uncertain for investors and the industry than a reasonable, market-based legislative solution,” said John Rowe, Exelon’s chairman and chief executive officer.

 

Two of the big rebel utility CEOs are national business figures: Rowe of Exelon is revered as a prince-philosopher inside and outside of the electric industry; and Peter Darbee of PG&E, who wrote a strongly-worded letter of resignation to Donohue, is a major corporate friend of the environment.

 

All three utilities, along with their Washington trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, favor cap-and-trade legislation now being considered in Congress. Another utility savant, James Rogers of Duke

Energy, is pulling his utility conglomerate out of the National Association of Manufacturers, because of its opposition to cap-and-trade.

 

Darbee hit hardest at the chamber. In a two-page letter he wrote: “We find it dismaying that the chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored. In our view, an intellectually honest agreement over the best policy response to the challenges to climate change is one thing; disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality of these challenges are quite another.”

 

The chamber has opposed not only the EPA’s plans to regulate carbon emissions in the absence of legislation, but also has attacked the scientific basis put forward by the agency. Yet Donohue insists that the chamber is neither denying the carbon emissions problem, nor is opposed to a legislative solution. Instead, it wants one tied to a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to protect U.S. companies from onerous conditions.

 

Friends of Donohue–who applaud much of what the chamber stands for–say that it is caught in a position where it has to say what it is for, not just what it is against. The chamber has always been at the barricades, not facing its own guns. The experience is novel and unpleasant for those on H Street. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

The Shocking Truth about Future Electric Supply

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TORONTO — “Nobody knows de trouble I see,” goes the Negro spiritual. It could have been playing as background music in Toronto, where the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) held its annual convention this week. Things are not terrible for the U.S. electric utility industry at the moment. But the industry’s future is more uncertain than it has ever been.

The challenge facing the industry is that we are using more electricity than ever before, with our bigger homes that have more appliances and gadgets. To meet future demand, according to Jeffry Sterba, chief executive officer of Albuquerque-based PNM Resources, the industry will need to spend $800 billion. Not only is it unclear whether it can raise this amount of money, in a time of constrained credit, but it is also unclear what expenditures public policy will sanction. Consider:

l The future of coal, which accounts for more than half of U.S. electricity production, is uncertain. It is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases, and the future promise of “clean coal” is yet to be realized on a large scale at an affordable price.

The second hope for coal, carbon capture and sequestration is a hot topic in electric utility circles. But David Ratcliffe, chief executive officer of Southern Company, confesses that it has been oversold, and it will be many years—if ever—before the technical and legal issues of diverting carbon dioxide and storing it by the millions of tons underground. The uncertainty has already caused 60 new coal-fired power plants to be canceled, according to speakers at the EEI convention.

l Nuclear power, a longtime favorite of utility executives, still faces public antipathy, and the cost of building the plants has gone up as the American engineering base has declined. The large steel forgings that are required for the construction of nuclear power plants can no longer be made in the United States. They must be imported from Japan at great expense.

Also the U.S. nuclear industry, thriving in the 1960s, has been sold off. Where once there were four U.S. companies that offered nuclear power plants, now General Electric is the only one, and it is in partnership with Japan’s Hitachi. The once mighty Westinghouse Electric is owned by Japan’s Toshiba. And the other vendor is France’s Areva. Only Ratcliffe’s Southern Company is sure that it is going to build two nuclear units. Other companies, including Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, have expressed interest in about 14 new plants—only about half of these are likely to be built.

The Nuclear Energy Institute reckons the nation needs a whopping 65 new nuclear plants to meet new demand and to allow for the retirement some of the more than 100 operating reactors.

l Wind is a bright spot. Wind power has proved more effective for most utilities than they thought, and they are now scrambling to find ways to store wind power as compressed air. But while the West and the North have good wind conditions, the Southeast suffers stagnant air at the time it most needs electricity: the summer. It is an energy option that is not open to every utility and because of its dispersed nature, it is not as manageable as a large coal-fired or nuclear plant.

l Then there is natural gas, which is the most desirable fossil fuel. In the past 25 years, the use of natural gas to turn utility turbines has grown exponentially, from 0 to 30 percent of generation. The trouble is that there is not that much indigenous natural gas around, and there are demands on it for home heating, cooking and fertilizer manufacturing, which are seen as higher uses than making electricity.

This has led to a boom in the import of liquefied natural gas from Asia and the Middle East. But James Rodgers, chief executive officer of Duke Energy, which is a large gas seller as well as a major electric utility, says that this is a dangerous route. By the time the gas gets here, after it has been liquefied and transported in an oil-burning tanker, Rodgers says it is only 20 percent less polluting than coal. Worse, he says this will harness U.S. electric rates to the global cost of oil and gas. That way he sees ruin.

Like their compatriots in the oil industry, utility executives talk a lot about technology coming to the rescue. But so far, there has been nothing that suggests a revolution akin to the one that transformed telephony is in sight. The only really happy thing here in Toronto is the realization that the plug-in hybrid car is coming, and that it will boost utilities’ revenues by recharging overnight when there is a surplus of electricity.