• Continue encouraging all customers and suppliers to pursue all cost-effective energy efficiency through its current regulatory culture • Make greater efforts to ensure all system and environmental benefits provided by energy efficiency are fully and appropriately valued in the planning, acquisition and regulatory decisions. Likewise, the costs and challenges associated with energy efficiency should be fully and appropriately considered as well • Consider establishing energy-efficiency targets and/or utility incentive programs for successful management of energy-efficiency and demandside response programs • Pursue additional analysis and evaluation of utility and ratepayer impacts of high- efficiency scenarios • Consider rate recovery mechanisms that balance the first-year costs of energy-efficiency programs while benefits are accrued across many years. Alternative rate recovery mechanisms may be necessary to give energy-efficiency resources comparable treatment to supply-side generation resources that are amortized over multiple years. Impacts this approach may have on a utility’s financial condition should be considered as part of this effort.
VII. TRANSMISSION, INFRASTRUCTURE AND TRANSPORTATION Historically, energy producers have focused on providing competitive costs while balancing other factors and risks. Increasingly other requirements and public policy objectives have become more predominant in thinking about the new energy economy and climate change. Infrastructure providers find themselves caught between customers who have become accustomed to low energy costs and continue to demand low costs, and those policies that promote renewable energy, conservation and the green economy with the potential for incrementally higher energy costs. In Utah, peak demand for electricity rose steadily through the 1990s, with significant increases in the years prior to 2008. While growth has slowed significantly, consumer demand for electricity is still growing. The demand for natural gas has followed a similar path since natural gas is now increasingly being used for electricity and faces the same challenges.
Electric and natural gas transmission is a key part of any state’s overall energy policy, but it is the most difficult component of the energy delivery system to construct. Long planning timelines, large geographic footprint, complex permitting from multiple jurisdictions and huge capital costs make energy transmission
UTAH INGENUITY AT WORK INSTITUTE FOR CLEAN AND SECURE ENERGY The Institute for Clean and Secure Energy (ICSE) grew from a long tradition of combustion research at the University of Utah beginning in the 1950s and continuing to today’s level of over 120 faculty, staff, and students. ICSE formed from the combination of several strong research programs that focused on combustion simulation, analysis, and experiments. In 2004, the University of Utah officially recognized ICSE as a permanent institute. The mission of ICSE is education through interdisciplinary research onhigh-temperature fuel utilization processes for energy generation, and associated environmental, health, policy, and performance issues. ICSE employs an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to the study of energy, combustion and high-temperature fuel-utilization processes by combining hands-on experimental work with analytical tools and simulation. This approach enables ICSE to develop predictive tools for these highly complex processes, which span multiple scales of time and space. ICSE has the resources and expertise to address and improve the understanding of these processes, which are often associated with applied systems and industrial applications.
Utah’s 10-Year Strategic Energy Plan
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