Ali Kenner's May 2021 Media Brief Reflection

This month I followed the same media review process as I have for the last six months. I’m subscribed to two digests put out by Energy News Network, one for the U.S. and a second digest specific to energy news in the Northeast region. This is how I found the artifact on New Jersey’s utility shutoff moratorium, which I thought was important to include given that it offers a cross-state comparison with Pennsylvania and Delaware, the other Mid-Atlantic states we’re looking at in this project. I thought it was interesting that New Jersey’s moratorium went three months longer than Pennsylvania’s and that there was clear public discourse on how the state could use federal funds to cover residential utility debt, as well as expansion of utility company assistance programs. This was not part of public discourse around the moratorium's expiration in PA. 

Through the U.S. energy news digest I found a story on TVA’s energy education project in schools, “Energy Uplift”. The short, Associated Press article didn’t provide much information on the program so we’ll look into this later this month in greater detail. But, I couldn’t help noticing that TVA’s public facing website is now titled Energy Right…. I wonder how long they’ve had that brand going. TVA has been of interest to me for more than a decade, following the Kingston coal ash disaster. And our project is very much about energy education, albeit public or community-driven rather than through schools. We might do a comparative analysis of TVA’s education program versus the more grassroots, residential program offered through PGW.  

I found the article on PECO’s computer glitch one morning while reading The Philadelphia Inquirer. I thought this was a good article to include in the media brief because it's a case of service termination that I don’t think anyone in the group had thought of previously in our discussions about shutoff scenarios: an erroneous residential service shutoff triggered by a computer glitch. The article did not mention what demographic of customers were impacted by the glitch.

My final article of the month, on whether PJM interconnection is prepared for summer’s peak demand, I found on the last day of the month, when I did a google search for “Philadelphia utilities” to make sure I didn’t miss anything. This article reads like a public version of energy forecasting, and made me wonder who the intended audience was for this one.

(It’s also worth noting that Russ Zerbo sent over a couple of articles this month on PA’s public utility commission and recent actions they’ve taken. At least one of these was part of Briana’s article collection. This came about after an exchange that Russ and I had about alternative energy suppliers in PA and how wreckless they have been.)

Ali’s Artifacts

The Associated Press, "Federal utility to spend $7.3M on energy training in schools", contributed by Alison Kenner, The Energy Rights Project, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 31 May 2021, accessed 1 June 2021.

Tom Johnson, "Hundreds of thousands of utility customers facing shut-offs", contributed by Alison Kenner, The Energy Rights Project, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 31 May 2021, accessed 1 June 2021.

Andrew Maykuth, "PECO improperly shut off nearly 50,000 customers because of computer glitches", contributed by Morgan Sarao and Alison Kenner, The Energy Rights Project, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 1 June 2021, accessed 1 June 2021.

Donna Rovins, "Region’s electric grid operator is ready to meet summer demand", contributed by Alison Kenner and Alison Kenner, The Energy Rights Project, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 1 June 2021, accessed 1 June 2021.