Grid Study Points To Power Market Redesign

Breaking: The U.S. Power Market Is Cracking

Liam Denning, August 24, 2017 (Bloomberg News)

“…[The most important point in the just-released DOE grid study is] on the first of 181 pages: ‘The U.S. electricity industry is facing unprecedented changes’…[There was a repeated emphasis on the need to shore up struggling ‘baseload’ coal and nuclear plants] for the sake of resiliency…[But] the mix of U.S. power from different sources is more diverse than ever…The report will no doubt push the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to at least hold hearings on potential reforms to wholesale power markets…There is a legitimate discussion to have about how to optimize power pricing to send the right signals to the market…[because it was] never designed for job creation, tax preservation, politically popular generation, or anything other than reliable, affordable electricity…More than anything else, the grid study reaffirms that the first era of the U.S. electricity market, lasting roughly a century, is over and that the market mechanisms have fallen way behind the times…In a world of cheap gas, flat demand and falling prices for renewable-power technologies, building large-scale, rather than scaleable, power sources is a massive, multiyear, multi-administration gamble. Price accordingly.” click here for more

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