Media Round-Up: Green Project Director Michael Moynihan at COMPETE Coalition Forum

Yesterday, Michael Moynihan spoke alongside energy experts Bill Massey, Dan Munson, and Kurt Yeager at an event hosted by the COMPETE Coalition. Here are a couple of the accounts of the event from trade press:

From Restructuring Today:

Compete Coalition conference reminded why innovation is key 

The current system of power industry regulation is ill-suited for driving innovation in the very significant ways needed to address climate change, experts said at a Compete Coalition event yesterday in Washington. Innovation in the industry has been declining, notwithstanding the work at EPRI, with low R&D budgets and little incentive to try new things, said think tank NDN's Green Project Director Michael Moynihan.

Moynihan's report titled "Electricity 2.0" advocates opening up the grid or "network" to two-way communication between customers and suppliers.

More here (subscription required).

From Electric Power Daily:

Experts decry antiquated nature of grid, regulations 

The current regulatory structure "has created the grid it was designed to create" but is extremely ill-suited to meet the needs of a 21st century electric industry, an official with a Washington think tank said Wednesday.

US consumers can "buy flowers from Ecuador but can't get electricity, moving at the speed of light, from one coast to the other," Michael Moynihan, director of NDN's Green Project, said at a panel discussion hosted by the Compete Coalition.

With a structure that offers no incentive to conduct innovative research and development, or even to deploy innovations by others, the electric utility industry cannot be expected to lead the way to a clean energy future, he asserted. Moynihan avoided laying blame entirely at the feet of the power industry, observing that "we absolutely do not have the policies in place" to encourage innovation; to the 

contrary, they work against it.

Sharing the view that industry is not to blame, Dick Munson, senior vice president at Recycled Energy Development, agreed it is a policy problem. "Without competition, we are going to limit ourselves to expensive and dirty power," he asserted. The current regulatory regime "is byzantine at best."

But that does not mean there is no role for government, Munson continued. "Government needs to set the goals for where we are headed," and open up the markets to "a flood of innovators and entrepreneurs," he said.

Decrying a "bipartisan habit" on Capitol Hill of trying to pick winners, Munson suggested Congress should "set the standards and let the market figure out how to get there." And whatever the standards, added Kurt Yeager, executive director of the Galvin Electricity Initiative, the government must hold all companies to them.

One thing that is desperately needed is a standard for putting power onto the electric grid, Moynihan said. While there is a standard outlet for a consumer to plug into to draw electricity from the system, there is no standard inlet for getting power onto the system, he continued.

"That is precisely what you have in the organized markets," said William Massey, counsel for Compete. Competitive markets provide a standard "plug-and-play" feature and will "enable the innovation" advocated by the panelists, he added.

"A poorly designed market will perform poorly," Massey said, while a well-designed competitive market that encourages innovation can perform "exceedingly well."

A centralized organization, be it a utility or regulatory body, cannot do what the competitive market can, Moynihan agreed. You are "not going to get the diversity of ideas."

He recalled that AT&T's idea for advancing the old black rotary phone was to introduce the Princess phone. It was only after the telecommunications industry was pried open to competition that real innovation began. Likewise, a major obstacle faced by new technology in the electric industry is the "absence of the correct regulatory framework," Moynihan said.

More here (subscription required).

For more on Electricity 2.0, please visit www.ndn.org/electricity20