To reduce the strain on California's electric grid, regulators ordered utilities to curtail supplies to big commercial users that have agreed to cut their electric consumption in times of shortage.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation NERCC), the continent's grid reliability regulator, found that of the 19.5 GW of generating capacity disabled in the 2014 polar vortex, about 91% failed due to equipment frozen in diverse ways that took three pages to list (pp. 14 16).
Those procedures came about after lawmakers, alarmed by media reports about the vulnerability of the grid, demanded regulators do something.
Olsen's assessment, which is echoed by many other California grid experts, regulators, and utility executives, completely flips the old paradigm.
And National Grid is encouraged to reinvest in the grid because the regulator will allow it to earn higher profits if it does.
But Blake and other micro-hydro developers in rural Wales and the west country say they cannot expand in many areas because large wind and solar companies have taken all the capacity on the grid and [the regulator] Ofgem's rules state that private operators rather than the public money must pay for any upgrade.
Deregulation increased the vulnerability of the grid to failure, regulators and industry executives broadly concur.
The technology's potential to shape demand in Brazil's commercial sector can encourage policy makers, regulators, grid operators and utilities in considering ITES as an option to reduce peak demand, increase security of supply and support the integration of intermittent renewable generation.
Here is something else that would be smart: Before ComEd's customers pay for a smart grid in Illinois, regulators and lawmakers should insist that ComEd disclose what it plans to do with the information it collects from customers, and how much ComEd is likely to profit from the data.
While the outer parts (green leaves and blue frames) need actions by many different actors (politicians, regulators, grid operators, all kinds of companies, banks and citizens), the questions of market integration and market adaptation are strongly (but not exclusively) linked to actions by power producers and energy traders themselves.
