Federico Pena

Recently, the Houston Chronicle featured an op-ed by COMPETE Co-Chair Federico Peña. In his column, Peña highlights the benefits that Texas’ competitive electricity market has delivered to the state, including innovative products and services such as demand response, smart meters, intelligent grids, and transparency in price and usage.

Since the state’s electricity market was open to competition in the late 1990s, Texas’ energy marketplace has matured into one of the most successful in the nation.

The full column can be found at: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7524989.html

Today, COMPETE National Co-Chair Federico Peña, former Secretary of both the U.S Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Transportation, addressed more than 400 energy executives, regulators, energy buyers, and investors from across the country at the 22nd Annual KEMA Executive Forum in San Antonio, TX. Secretary Peña highlighted how competition in electricity markets is fostering innovation, including demand response services, smart meters, intelligent grids and renewable energy growth. He also discussed the findings of a KEMA white paper commissioned by COMPETE – released in Feb. 2011 – that highlights the correlation between competition and innovation.

The COMPETE Coalition will sponsor a day-long conference October 5th to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing national electric vehicle deployment, grid modernization and how they tie into America’s Smart Grid future.
 
The free conference – Electric Vehicle Technology and Grid Modernization: How PHEVs and Smart Grid Come Together – takes place at the Phoenix Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., and is co-sponsored by the Center for Business and Regulation, College of Business and Management, University of Illinois-Springfield.
 

Innovative smart grid and energy technology solutions can help achieve economic and environmental goals if customers have access to dynamic pricing. That message, and the role competitive markets play in these innovations, was front and center in remarks from national policy leaders at the recent National Town Meeting on Demand Response and Smart Grid. 
 
“Creating a smart grid is an essential part of the energy revolution,” said Congressman Ed Markey (D – MA) in a keynote address, before predicting that smart meter deployment will rise ten-fold over the next decade. “A global revolution in clean energy is needed, and competition between all for leadership in new energy will create jobs.”
 
Innovative new smart grid technologies are already springing up across the country, spurred on by competition. “Because we have organized markets, we are ahead in our ability to bring technology and demand response to consumers,” said Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, during a roundtable on the future of smart grid policy. Wellinghoff cited PJM Interconnection’s 9,000 megawatts of dispatachable demand and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle pilot program, as well as Constellation NE’s VirtuWatt technology.

In recent remarks, entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates called for “energy miracles” to meet the threat of global climate change.  But we at COMPETE would submit that with or without divine intervention, organized competitive markets have become incubators of technological innovation and renewable energy that meet rising demand with efficient clean energy generation.

“COMPETE believes a market-based approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and producing clean electricity offers the most innovative and economically efficient means of addressing climate change,” said Federico Peña, COMPETE Coalition Co-Chair and former U.S. Secretary of Energy.

Michigan State Senator Cameron Brown has announced plans to introduce legislation raising the state’s limit on electricity market competition to 30 percent, according to the trade publication Electric Power Daily. This action signals new promise for consumers facing rising electricity rates in a beleaguered economy.

Last August, and again in December, electricity consumers in Consumers Energy and DTE Energy’s respective service territories reached Michigan’s 10 percent limit on consumer choice for electricity.  This left 90 percent of the electricity demand for those two utilities — which serve the vast majority of the state’s consumers —without a lower-cost alternative to their monopoly utility provider.