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The state of California is trying to find ways to carry its abundance of renewable energy from areas that have it to areas that do not. Last week, the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) released Phase 2 of its conceptual transmission plan, designed to develop a renewable energy infrastructure.

Report: Electric Utilities Investing Billions in Transmission The U.S. electric utility industry invested $6.9 billion in transmission projects in 2006, and members of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) plan to invest another $38.1 billion from 2007 to 2010, according to a new EEI report. This represents a 60% increase above the amount invested from 2003 to 2006. EEI is the association of shareholder-owned U.S. electric companies and represents about 70% of the U.S. electric power industry. The EEI report notes that transmission lines are being added for a variety of reasons, and one is to connect remote renewable energy resources to the electrical grid.

a number of the renewable energy-rich areas are too far from the electric transmission grid to render them useful. "We've made tremendous progress developing the transmission plan to bring electricity from the wind-rich Tehachapi Mountain area to Southern California customers. Our goal with RETI is to identify the next Tehachapi." -- Dian M. Grueneich, Commissioner, California Public Utilities Commission In an attempt to alleviate this dilemma, California has formed a public-private partnership called the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) to consider the feasibility of building new transmission lines to access renewable generation.

This paper examines the incentives that generation firms have in restructured electricity markets for supporting long-term transmission investments. In particular, we study whether generation firms, which arguably play a dominant role in the restructured electricity markets, have the incentives to fund or support incremental social-welfare-improving transmission investments.

iemens VDO intends to offer its customers all electric drive system components from a single supplier. The company is this also at work on high performance energy accumulators and transmissions to support the hybrid drives. Siemens VDO is already working on a full-electric system that transfers the drive to the wheels without using a conventional transmission.

An idealized application for superconductors is to employ them in the transmission of commercial power to cities. However, due to the high cost and impracticality of cooling miles of superconducting wire to cryogenic temperatures, this has only happened with short "test runs". In May of 2001 some 150,000 residents of Copenhagen, Denmark, began receiving their electricity through HTS (high-temperature superconducting) material. That cable was only 30 meters long, but proved adequate for testing purposes. In the summer of 2001 Pirelli completed installation of three 400-foot HTS cables for Detroit Edison at the Frisbie Substation capable of delivering 100 million watts of power. This marked the first time commercial power has been delivered to customers of a US power utility through superconducting wire. Intermagnetics General has announced that its IGC-SuperPower subsidiary has joined with BOC and Sumitomo Electric in a $26 million project to install an underground, HTS power cable in Albany, New York, in Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation's power grid. Sumitomo Electric's DI-BSCCO cable was employed in the first in-grid power cable demonstration project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and New York Energy Research & Development Authority. After connecting to the grid successfully on July 2006, the DI-BSCCO cable has been supplying the power to approximately 70,000 households without any problems. The long-term test will be completed in the 2007-2008 timeframe.

Only recently have we begun to realize that a renewable energy future does not inevitably mean a decentralized energy future. Indeed, right now the fastest growing part of the renewable energy industry may be the large solar central power systems being built in remote locations in the southwest to serve customers in Los Angeles, and the huge wind farms being built in the Midwest to serve customers in Chicago.

ITRE voted that ownership unbundling of vertically integrated companies (carrying out both generation/sales and transmission) be obligatory

Member States adopt a definition of "energy poverty"

An obligation should be placed on distribution companies by national regulatory authorities to introduce smart meters ("bi-directional electronic meters") "which shall be rolled out to all consumers within 10 years after entry into force of the Directive".