October-December 1998 Issue


SPECIAL REPORT:
Electric Utility Program Refocuses, Disbands

This fall--after a twenty-year run--Professor Jefferson W. Tester, director of the Energy Laboratory, and Mr. Stephen R. Connors, director of the Electric Utility Program (EUP), decided to disband the EUP. In recent years, rapid changes in regulation of electric industries in many regions have led to a dramatic shift in how electric utilities view research, especially in a collaborative academic environment. Utilities have become less able to pursue collaborative research as time horizons have shortened and some vertically integrated companies have restructured.

While the EUP will no longer officially exist, the Energy Laboratory continues to be active in several areas of electric industry research. Mr. Connors continues to direct the Energy Laboratory's Analysis Group for Regional Electricity Alternatives (AGREA), which currently is developing energy assessment models to explore cost-effective low-emissions energy strategies in Switzerland, Japan, and China. (Look for a description of these research initiatives and their latest results in an upcoming issue of e-lab.) Mr. Connors is also assisting Dr. Marija Ilic with her latest research consortium, "New Concepts and Software for Competitive Power Systems," and Dr. James Weaver with his continuing research on biophysical mechanisms associated with electromagnetic field exposure.

The EUP began in the mid-1970s and over the years provided an international group of electric utilities, power equipment manufacturers, and related companies with workshops, research, and analysis relating to combustion, environmental performance, transmission and distribution, and--in later years--competition-oriented topics. From 1984 through 1996 the EUP had more than two dozen members from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Venezuela, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. More than a hundred workshops and conferences were held.

Although the restructuring of electric industries was well under way in other countries by 1994, it was not until the submission of deregulation legislation in the United States (California in particular) that the EUP began to see significant shifts in member participation and support for collaborative research. As electric utility research departments were significantly reduced--and in some cases eliminated--we recognized that basic research was shifting to technology providers. Therefore, we decided that it would be more productive to pursue more narrowly focused collaborations such as Dr. Ilic's research on open access transmission and the Energy Laboratory's Energy Choices Program (including AGREA), led by Dr. Elisabeth M. Drake. We plan to develop new research initiatives as opportunities arise.