US Electric Power Markets – National Overview

If you have ever wanted to understand changes in your suppliers’ electricity costs, you might find this U.S. federal government website useful. It identifies regions and ‘hubs’. The best news is that pricing for most hubs is free and a matter of public record.

via FERC: Electric Power Markets – National Overview.

Warmth Expected Across U.S. for Next Three Months

Temperatures around the U.S. have been as high as 65 degrees Fahrenheit (19.4 Celsius) above normal in the past week, with 400 record highs set yesterday, said Laura Furgione, deputy director of the National Weather Service.

Warmer temperatures across the U.S. in the last three months has “decimated the market” for natural gas, said Stephen Schork, president of Schork Group in Villanova, Pennsylvania, and reduced the need for all types of energy for heating. The trend is expected to continue through May in the eastern U.S. as well as the Southwest.

via Warmth Expected Across U.S. for Next Three Months, U.S. Says – Bloomberg.

The natural gas glut is driving down electricity prices

Mirroring the gas market, wholesale electricity prices have dropped more than 50 percent on average since 2008, and about 10 percent during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a Jan. 11 research report by Aneesh Prabhu, a New York-based credit analyst with Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC.

Prices in the west hub of PJM Interconnection LLC, the largest wholesale market in the U.S., declined to about $39 per megawatt hour by December 2011 from $87 in the first quarter of 2008.

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Should Homeland Security control the electrical grid? Maybe

The electrical grid is commonly cited as a potential security issue for the U.S. and in a wide-ranging study on the matter, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that the time has come for the U.S. government to focus a single agency’s efforts on doing a better job of securing it.

The issue, MIT‘s researchers say, is that the many stakeholders involved in maintaining the U.S. electrical grid aren’t working together, even though “cybersecurity regulations for bulk power systems already exist in the form of the NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection reliability standards.” For one, the researchers point out, those standards only apply to “the bulk power system and does not include the distribution system.” Distribution utilities on the local level are operating outside current regulations, making managing the entire grid practically impossible, the researchers added.

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