October - November 2001

IEEE-USA President's Message

Introduction by Ned R. Sauthoff, President, IEEE-USA

Energy has re-emerged as a significant public policy issue. Over the past decade, several national energy plans and strategies have elicited mixed reactions. As the leading technical professional society in the area of electrotechnology, the IEEE has a responsibility to provide authoritative information and perspectives to decision-makers. IEEE-USA's Energy Policy Committee engages knowledgeable IEEE members, including delegates from many of the IEEE's technical societies, to develop position statements and present them to the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government. IEEE-USA's positions provide recommendations throughout the full spectrum from electricity generation, through transmission and distribution, to end-use. Recurring themes include the need to include technical facts and perspectives in the policy process, and for R&D to enable competition and reliability, and efficient end-use. These processes demand the involvement of engineers and scientists. In the article below, Energy Policy Committee chair Tom Schneider and vice chair Fernando Alvarado elaborate on these themes and challenge engineers to get involved. As another source of information, I recommend visiting the Energy Policy Committee's web page.

Energy Policies: The Evolving Role of Engineers

By Thomas Schneider, chair, IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee and Fernando Alvarado, vice chair, IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee

Sound energy policy requires more than a political balancing of popular interests. Because of the technological complexity of our national energy system, policy must also be consistent with technical and economic analyses prepared by professionals who are fully qualified in their respective disciplines. Energy policies that overlook or gloss over the importance of proper consideration of operational requirements of technology invariably lead to bad policies. It has been said that the laws of physics cannot be repealed. 

As the situation in California so clearly illustrated, the United States needs a comprehensive national energy policy designed to ensure an adequate, reliable, economical and environmentally acceptable supply of energy, particularly electrical energy, to meet both current and future energy challenges. Policies that create the necessary stable business conditions for orderly and efficient expansion must be in place. In some cases, growth will mean addition of generation by private parties. 

In other cases, growth will mean expansion of the transmission system. In other cases, it will mean development and deployment of new technologies. And in other cases growth will mean an increase in conservation and demand-side solutions to energy problems. However, in all cases the incentives must be there, protected by proper policies.

Policies must also prevent abuses due to monopolistic or irresponsible behavior. It is the role of government and policymakers to establish the rules by which the game is played — and then get out of the way, except for a role in policing for abuses. Because the government is also often looked upon as the entity of last resort, it does remain a role of government to monitor at some level the functioning of "critical infrastructures" such as the power grid itself and to be prepared to provide assistance in times of crisis.

The deregulation of the electric utility industry has posed fundamental challenges to the reliability of the electric power system. The present capacity of the transmission system is inadequate for supporting a fully competitive unified market. Developing better ways to operate transmission systems is the major technological challenge of restructuring. New and improved transmission, communication, control, and metering technologies and systems need to be developed for the new structure of the electrical system to succeed. In any event, it is imperative that policymakers work alongside those in the know about technology and technology limitations, not just economists and lawyers.

It is all too easy to take an entirely one-sided viewpoint: especially looking back from today at the decisions made about restructuring. Looking back, it is possible to argue that engineers know best, they can optimize and decide what is "best" for society. While some may cling to the notion of an all-sapient engineer, most others have come to realize that this one-sided view of the world is not tenable. 

Neither is the other extreme tenable — a world in which all we need to do is define what we want and the rules of the game, then sit back and "the market will provide." It is imperative that we embark today on a path that creates the policy environment where engineers work toward the goal of a better electricity supply with economists, political scientists, environmentalists, the government, businessmen and businesswomen, and customers. 

IEEE-USA encourages the adoption of a policy framework that will make the above possible. To ensure policies that are based on sound analysis, evaluations and understanding of the complex systems, we urge that the Department Of Energy/Federal Energy Regulatory Commission:

• immediately sponsor a substantial program to assess recent experience in the functioning of electric power markets; and

• analyze the effect of various market designs on the cost of electricity and system reliability. 

Too often in the last decade, policies have been legislated and promulgated through regulations without any sound analysis — either engineering or economic — of the consequences. The capabilities of the nation's electric power infrastructure need to be evaluated; recent and newly proposed policies are creating stress on the infrastructure and the full consequences are yet unclear. Such an evaluation or survey has been conducted in the past and is urgently needed today. Modeling and simulations of both the engineering and economic consequences of the new policies must be conducted, for it is far better to experiment with simulations and models than the real economy.

As engineers, we are positioned to provide our support and understanding of technology (and most particularly, technology limitations) to ensure that the right rules are put in place. We need to resist the temptation to dictate the best solutions. If we are persuasive in presenting our position, we will embark down a path that balances the short-term desires for cheap energy with the long-term needs that will ensure adequate future electricity supplies for our society.