Features List March 2005

Regular Feature - Market Review

In this edition, Colette Lewiner, Senior Vice President of the newly formed Capgemini Energy, reviews the progress, three years on from Enron, of the global electricity generating industry, with a forecast for the coming 12 months. She gives her views on the future of the power generating sector, including the nuclear industry, which many experts predict will grow over the coming years.

Strategic Operations

Hank Courtright, Vice President, Power Generation & Distributed Resources EPRI, is contributing a keynote article with a focus on the dilemma facing the EU: balancing fuel supply so that the current focus on wind and gas does not create too many problems. EPRI has developed a sophisticated ‘road mapping process’ by which electricity and power industry leaders have an opportunity to look ahead on key issues that effect their future.

Plus: Emissions Trading – to come into force in January 2005 and predicted to cause some upheaval – will EU member states be ready? Peter Loeffler, Head of Public Affairs, Cogen Europe has been monitoring the situation and will analyse the challenges and opportunities connected with emissions trading for Power Development International.

Bruce Johnston, Partner, LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, is examining the advantages of multilateral agencies in cross-border project financing. The article examines the structuring of certain specific power facilities, including some projects with ‘extreme characteristics’, i.e. situations in which multilateral financing agencies and commercial banks were competing in the project finance market and in other instances, where multilaterals were the sole potential source of funding.

Transmission & Distribution

The Next Steps in Latin America: Professor Ashley C. Brown, Executive Director of Harvard Electricity Policy Group will look at how the business environment (legal, regulatory, financial, political) is being changed inside Latin America's power sector. A special spotlight will focus on both the implications for Cogeneration and for Transmission & Distribution.

Gordon Feller, Editorial Consultant to Power Industry Development examines, from the power company’s standpoint, how ‘net metering’ makes everything easier by letting the customer use any extra electricity to offset utility-provided electricity used elsewhere in the billing cycle. The customer, in exchange, is billed only for the consumed energy provided by the utility. Could this represent a ‘solution revolution’?

Plus: Nick Weston, Marketing Manager, Energy Industries Sun Microsystems Inc. asks whether technology is the catalyst for a new T&D revolution. As the retail electricity distribution market becomes deregulated it becomes more competitive. Simply delivering electricity (or gas) to the home is now so commoditised that companies can no longer use it as a competitive weapon in their fight for market share. Higher value-added services must be provided. Technologies are giving companies, both large and small, new tools that allow them to build truly competitive services, which will enable their success in the market.

Also, Carl Pechman, President, Power Economics, and former Director of Law and Economics Consulting Group (LECG), investigates lessons learned from the Western USA power crisis and their implications for future market design.

Plant Equipment/Generation

Power Industry Development asked Bill Highlander, Vice President, Calpine, to provide an insight into Calpine’s systematic search for new independent power opportunities in emerging markets. With generation assets in multiple countries and a successful growth strategy, Calpine’s policy is to look for new investment opportunities in various parts of the world. How does the company decide where, and when, and with whom to partner? What role does financing play? How critical are regulatory and legal factors? Bill Highlander will explain the thinking behind these important issues.

Emerging Technologies

Jeff Graefe, Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of Global Energy Management Institute, University of Houston, focuses on the LNG-related choices facing companies who supply and transport LNG, as well as the power generators who are their customers. The article addresses the security and safety challenges that are blocking the development of more terminal facilities, and looks at how quickly power generators are likely to adapt their organisation and facilities to accommodate the in-flow of LNG as a primary fuel supply. Furthermore, it addresses the important function of banks, insurers and local government in providing the necessary support and services to enable supply to catch up with demand.

Please note that editorial contributors may be subject to change