Xenergy, Inc., the consulting firm, is offering UFTO subscribers a special discount price for their Distributed Generation study, which was done as a companion to their ongoing Retail Energy Management (REM) multiclient program.

This won't be a regular UFTO feature, but I was awestruck by a couple of headlines today, and thought I'd pass along a comment. After the wild "dot com" style run up of a several fuel cell stocks lately (you know the drill -- no earnings, huge valuations), another couple of amazing stories are breaking.

Bill Richardson initiated this effort last summer, on the heels of the various outages around the country. The team was assembled during September and went through its paces, coordinated by Paul Carrier in DOE headquarters.

Since the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which opened the U.S. electric power industry to the start of competition,1 investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs) have been under pressure to cut costs, to become more efficient, and to expand their products and services.

We first reported about WTC's work in an UFTO Note 12 Dec 1996. The story is the same, except for the tremendous progress they've made in less than 3 years -- pretty much according to their original plan!

"The Nation's Most Comprehensive Ratepayer-funded Public Interest Energy Research Program" is gradually maturing, as the transition projects are wrapping up (close-out funding of projects that IOU's had in place prior to restructuring), and the various programs establish their goals and directions.

It appears that California is gearing up to follow in the footsteps of Texas and New York, and do something about interconnection requirements.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory anticipates issuing Letters of Interest (LOI) to solicit research and development efforts from members of the Distributed Power Community and related industries. The anticipated effort will be directed to include modeling, field testing, and analysis to determine the means of integrating distributed power resources.

The most efficient turbine systems in the world will be highlighted at our conference, a topic of high interest to the Power Generation and Turbine Industry today. This program covers all projects that the DOE and industry/academia/labs are jointly performing.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has opened the competition for companies to begin designing a new type of energy facility that could change the way people think about fossil fuel power plants in the 21st century.

DP covers a wide gamut of topics, from village power and rural electrification to industrial power parks, partially self-powered office towers (incl. PV), combined heat and power (CHP) and all varieties of renewable energy. There are three "elements of success" that must be met -- technologies, markets, and policies.

It is not a matter if, or even when, but only of how fast, distributed generation will be deployed on a major scale. In fact, DG is already here, and has been for a long time, in various forms and applications. If it truly is a "disruptive technology", then we can expect it to lurk below the surface.

National Power (U.K.), has announced a new electricity storage technology - called Regenesys - in which a flowing electrolyte is charged and then and stored in tanks for later use. It has a high speed of response, supplies real and reactive power and is therefore suited to many different applications on a power system.

Attached are the six DRAFT white papers prepared for the CERTS program by the various participants (labs and others), which have been made available to UFTO for review and comment. These were presented at an invitational workshop last Friday Sept. 17. Apparently Hurricane Floyd dampened the attendance but not the enthusiasm.