Perception

With little fanfare and against a prevailing perception that private sector energy firms are looking warily at the West, Michigan-based CMS Energy last Wednesday announced it is opening a San Francisco office for its marketing, services and trading businesses, with a new director of western marketing operations, Laird Dyer, who was formerly with Enron and Pacific Gas Transmission in San Francisco.

The diversified energy group has seen a “profound change in its market perception,” with players growing faster than ever before, benefiting from the deregulated power industry, expansion in telecommunications and bandwidth trading and emerging technologies, according to Dain Rauscher Wessels’ analyst Mark Easterbrook.

The diversified energy group has seen a “profound change in itsmarket perception,” with players growing faster than ever before,benefiting from the deregulated power industry, expansion intelecommunications and bandwidth trading and emerging technologies,according to Dain Rauscher Wessels’ analyst Mark Easterbrook.

The future of merchant power will be inhibited unless there arenew approaches and new perceptions about the technical, economicand political approaches applied, according to a panel of expertsat GasMart/Power 2000 Tuesday in Denver. Regardless of what preciseindustry changes are made, not all of the proposed new power plantswill get built, and distributed generation ultimately will have toplay a role to satisfy the expected growing demand that equates toabout 5 Tcf of added gas over the next 10 years, according topanelists discussing “The Runaway World of Merchant Power.”

The perception that there is no need to “rush” natural gasunbundling and customer choice has prevailed in Californiafollowing actions by the state legislature and energy regulators.That allows the major investor-owned gas utilities to prepare formore competition and gain more experience in wide-rangingsettlements that they negotiated with their major suppliers,shippers and marketers.