A report prepared for the South Carolina state legislature and released last week determined that a range of electric market and transmission reforms — including creating a new independent organization to run the electric grid or joining an existing one — would bring “substantial benefits” for customers, potentially as much as $362 million a year.
The report by the Brattle Group, a Boston consulting firm, stems from the V.C. Summer nuclear plant fiasco that saddled the state’s ratepayers with billions in cost overruns for reactors that were never built.
And it’s the latest chapter in a long-running saga over a southern-fried electric grid anomaly.
The majority of U.S. electric customers live in areas managed by regional transmission organizations, which coordinate the flow of electricity, ensure reliability, plan transmission projects and run electric markets. In large parts of the West, consumers benefit from a separate market that helps move low cost electricity around and manages congestion on transmission lines. But most of the Southeast remains dominated by a handful of large utility companies that have successfully thrown back attempts to bring them under any kind of similar arrangement.
“Basically, utilities have a lot of political power in the Southeast,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a consulting firm focused on integrating clean power into the grid. “It’s not like utilities didn’t have power in the Northeast or Midwest or California, but there was a strong movement 20 years ago to get to a more efficient type of market and utilities in the Southeast resisted any such efforts in their region.”
‘Unfettered control’
The South Carolina report, which got a lukewarm reception from lawmakers there, per the Charlotte Business Journal, comes as big employers like Google looking to meet corporate sustainability goals express frustration with the lack of market…
Read the full article here
