NewsData’s Energy West

Jason Hunter, a former employee of Riverside Public Utilities, is still looking for answers regarding contracting activity he witnessed at the organization years ago. Bolstering his claims of wrongdoing is the fact that some of the individuals involved in the alleged activity are now serving prison sentences for later activities at Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. It’s a wild story complete with employee harassment; police harassment; Federal Bureau of Information raids on LADWP offices; and conflicts of interest, as well as shell companies, luxury cars and beachfront condos.

Hunter alleges that after years of seeking the truth and seeking an audit of the contracting activities he witnessed more than a decade ago, the alleged crimes were never punished. He is still waiting for the City of Riverside to perform the audit, which nobody can seem to complete.

Check out the latest episode of People in Power to hear the whole story.

The effort to create a regional wholesale energy market in the West moved forward in 2023 when a group of state regulators from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington advanced a proposal “for ensuring that the benefits of wholesale electricity markets are maximized for customers across the entire Western U.S.” This led to the creation of the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative, driven by stakeholders across the West who realize the reliability and cost benefits that could be created with a wider wholesale market that includes California.

In the inaugural episode of People in Power, NewsData’s Jason Fordney speaks with Kathleen Staks, director of Western Freedom and a member of the WWGPI Launch Committee, about the effort. This interview was conducted just prior to the issuance of WWGPI’s Step 2 proposal, which would create a new regional organization to oversee the market. NewsData's Abigail Sawyer also shares her thoughts about observing the demolition of the San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico.

Virtual power plants are an old idea being revolutionized by new technology. VPPs bundle distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar, demand response, energy storage and electric-vehicle chargers, into a single grid-scale resource. Proponents say they are essential to decarbonizing and meeting growing demand. The U.S. Department of Energy says VPPs could provide as much as 20 percent of demand in 2030. John Manetti and Aaron August come on Energy West to talk about Puget Sound Energy's VPP, which launched in November. It is about 30 MW now. The company plans to expand it to at least 86 MW by the end of 2025 and could provide 10 percent or more of the company's demand in just a few years. 

In the latest episode of NewsData’s Energy West podcast, California Energy Markets Editor Jason Fordney interviews Kyri Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, about her research into the locational marginal pricing methods currently used by most independent system operators. During her research, Baker noticed that LMPs mimic the behavior of direct-current circuits, leading to her research paper published in late March. Tune in to Energy West for details on this entirely new way to understand wholesale energy pricing in ISOs!

Demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning is booming—and so is AI’s energy demand. AI requires massive amounts of computing power, which means huge data centers need to be built to enable AI’s widespread adoption.

AI’s energy demand is expected to grow faster than new generation comes on line. Solving that will be hard enough, but differences between the tech industry and the electric power industry make it even more difficult in some ways. The tech industry evolved with a move-fast-and-break-things ethos, while the electric power industry is one of the most heavily regulated and conservative industries in the country. Developing a new data center takes 12, 18, maybe 24 months, whereas adding new generation and transmission takes years.

Tech and power are odd bedfellows, and while they are getting to know each other better, they still have plenty more to learn.

Ben Lee, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the handful of people in the country who works in the space between the electric power industry and big tech. He says there are opportunities for the two to work more productively together. There are also some things that likely will not make much of a difference to accommodating AI demand in the near future, such as time-of-use rates.