Dear Secretary Clinton,

Thank you for the opportunity to ask a question about the need for fundamental energy reform in the Americas. As a result of the California-Enron crisis, electricity reform underwent a push from market deregulation towards excessive regulation. Fundamental reform is urgently needed to balance market and regulation appropriately, to get the power industry into a higher performance plateau in the emerging digital Era.

As the Obama administration has taken action to strongly face the systemic economic, energy and environmental crisis, that are mutually reinforcing each other with many vicious circles that are increasing poverty in the Americas, I wonder Why there is not a fundamental reform of the investor owned utilities framework, which is holding back the process and reducing at a large costs the great opportunities for the needed magnitude of large leverage?

Please ask Matt_at_State [see below] to brief you about my response on this Townhall about how the questions he asked me on the Energy and Environment Forum.

Best regards,

José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, PhD.
Systemic Consultant: Electricity.
BS ´68, MS ´71 & PhD ´72, all from Cornell University.
Valued IEEE Member for 38 Years.
javs@ieee.org
Follow on http://twitter.com/gmh_upsa
http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/
http://grupomillenium.blogspot.com/
Research and practice areas, and interests: Electricity Without Price Controls; Systems architecture; Systems thinking; Retail marketing; Customer orientation; Information systems requirements and design; Market rules; Contract assistance
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Climate change and energy security concerns can be dealt with a new order. Such order calls for reform to allow the emergence of a whole system. Go to my websites to learn about electricity without price controls framework, which shift the obsolete socialized price controls into efficient individualized pricing that results in least costs to customers and thus maximum social welfare.
Posted by JoseAVanderhorstS

Thank you. I think we all agree that we need to move to a lower-carbon basis for our economy. We have tried over the years to promote this movement in different ways — stimulating use of biofuels, promoting regional integration of energy markets, including elctricity grids, e.g. — and some of these efforts have borne fruit. But we obviously need something more. We hope to begin a regional conversation on how to do this at the Summit — what central themes should be top priority? How can we engage governments, private sectors and civil society groups in a constructive way?
Posted by Matt_at_State

1st question: “… what central themes should be top priority?” the need for a paradigm shift away from the investor owned framework that has a strong attraction force to fossil fuels and supply side only solutions. A new center of attraction should enable the development of the resources of the demand side, without artificial decoupling of profits and sales, just to keep the old framework in place.

2nd question “… How can we engage governments, private sectors and civil society groups in a constructive way?” There is a need to divide the highly complex power industry emerging whole in two subsystems: 1) a regulated power transportation system and 2) an open market business system. Those two systems should interact to mutually reinforce each other. See next…The architecting of the power transportation system is an enginnering problem that should be designed, operated and controlled by the ultraquality imperative, just as is done for space flights, nuclear power stattions, etc. Next on the business system.

To engage stakeholders, according to Eberhardt Rechtin and Mark Maeir, in their book “The Art of System Architecting,” to go forward “[S]ocial economist bring two special insights to sociotechnical systems.” They are: 1) “the four who’s:” who benefits? who pays? who provides? and, as appropiate, who loses? and 2) In any resource-limited situation, the true value of a given service or product is determined by what one is willing to give up to obtain it. That’s it.
Posted by JoseAVanderhorstS