Catherine Elder Named Director of Aspen’s Energy Resource Economics Practice

Catherine Elder now heads Aspen’s Energy Resource Economics (ERE) Practice. Formerly known as the Integrated Electricity Analysis and Policy Group, ERE will continue to perform integrated policy and economic analysis of energy resource issues. Recent examples include helping Energy Commission staff with their methodology for forecasting natural gas vehicle demand, providing comments and critical insight to the Technical Advisory Group of the Western Interstate Energy Board’s gas-electric infrastructure adequacy study, and working with the Demand Analysis Working Group and panel of academic experts on issues around further regional disaggregation of staff’s electricity demand forecast and processes for normalizing the peak demand forecast for weather. Another project underway at ERE involves low resolution exploratory modeling to broadly evaluate energy policy outcomes far into the future where traditional forecasting is not useful. Elder, who offers a nationwide perspective on energy market and policy dynamics, spoke at Heartland Consumers Power District (South Dakota) annual meeting in April and will again be working on a committee advising the North American Energy Standards Board as it provides input to FERC on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. The Rulemaking is aimed at bringing the gas and electricity trading and scheduling days into better alignment, which will be needed as US utilities increasingly add more gas-fired generation. She also assisted both the Energy Commission and the American Public Power Association in understanding the reasons for the electricity and natural gas market price spikes in February of this year and why disconnects between the two industries led California to declare its February 6 Flex Alert.