 
|
||||||||||||||||
              
|
  One out of three ain’t bad, when it comes to power costs By Ken Zapinski, Post-Gazette Staff Writer You don't have to be a George Westinghouse to shop for a new power supplier. But it does help to know a little about the electric industry to understand exactly what is going on in Pennsylvania.
Utilities like Duquesne Light Co. have three jobs. They generate electricity, usually by heating water to create steam to turn giant turbines. Any fuel will do, but Duquesne relies primarily on coal-fired boilers and nuclear power plants. Once a stream of electricity is created, it is carried by high-voltage cables on huge steel towers from the power plant to the areas where the power is needed. When the power arrives, a gentle trickle of the juice is sent down the wires that criss-cross streets and neighborhoods and feed into our homes and factories. Pennsylvania is introducing competition into the generation stage of the business. Transmission and distribution will remain regulated monopolies. Few people, for instance, would want a competing electric company coming down their street to string yet another set of wires. In the future, utilities like Duquesne Light will act somewhat like the Postal Service — delivering to its customers whatever they choose to buy from whomever they chose to buy it. Just as your postal carrier will deliver your winter coat whether you ordered it from the Sears catalog, Spiegel or L.L. Bean, so too will your utility deliver the electricity no matter whom you buy it from. But who will sell it to you, and how will they get it to Western Pennsylvania? Some outside companies may purchase Duquesne Light's power plants at Beaver Valley, Elrama, Cheswick and elsewhere when the utility sells them next year under orders from the Public Utility Commission. These suppliers would then market their power to whomever wants to buy it. Others might produce power miles or even states away to sell to Pittsburgh customers. Here is how that works. Adjacent utilities generally work together to pool their power, swapping electricity back and forth to make sure everybody has enough at any given time. Imagine it as a huge lake. The lake level will remain stable when you take out your water as long as someone, somewhere, is dumping in a corresponding amount of water. That's why a company can produce power in Indiana, for instance, to serve customers in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh customer pulls it out of the pool and the Indiana power plant dumps more in. That works, however, only if there are enough high-voltage transmission wires in the right place to make sure power can flow freely between utilities to keep the system stable. And that is what had the PUC so concerned about the proposed Duquesne Light Co.-Allegheny Energy Inc. merger. Together, the two companies would have controlled so many transmission routes it could have limited competition in this region, the PUC feared. Richard Zomnir and Alexander Galatic of Strategic Energy Ltd., an energy management firm, compare the wires to high-speed toll roads. How easy it is to get on those roads and how expensive they are to travel will help determine whether customers will save any money through electric competition. Think of it this way. If an auto dealership in Philadelphia were selling cars for thousands less than dealers in Pittsburgh, people could save a bundle by buying over there, even with the additional travel costs. But if there were no easy way to get the car back home — or if the turnpike was so expensive that it sucked up all the savings — the faraway dealer would not provide any real competition in the Pittsburgh market. To prevent that from happening, the PUC set stringent restrictions on the proposed Duquesne Light merger. The new company would have had to turn over operation of its transmission lines to an independent alliance, so competitors would be assured of getting access to the Pittsburgh market. If that was unworkable, the company would have had to sell off some of its generating plants to ensure that outside competitors had power to sell to Pittsburgh-area customers. Sound a little obscure? But those were among the restrictions that caused DQE Inc., Duquesne Light's parent company, to scuttle the merger. Duquesne Light decided to go it alone and get out of the generation business all together.
|
|||||||||||||||
