Thunderstorms this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 66F. Winds W at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%..
Tonight
Thunderstorms this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 66F. Winds W at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
Cherry Hill, Evesham/Marlton, Medford, Medford Lakes, Moorestown, Mount Laurel, Voorhees and elsewhere near the iconic state highways of Routes 70 and 73.
People nominated by governors to be president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities — the state board with oversight of electric and other utility rates — usually do not attract much attention.
That seemingly was the case on Friday when Gov. Mikie Sherrill pulled from the electric industry and named researcher/consultant Ben Hertz-Shargel as a BPU commissioner with the ultimate goal of getting him confirmed as the next board president.
What news coverage we could find by Saturday afternoon amounted to light rewrites of the news release from the governor's office.Â
But Hertz-Shargel likely will play a key role as New Jersey comes to grips with the fact that it has cut back electrical generation so deeply that it has become a net importer of power. That has made customers vulnerable to swings in market demand.
"New Jersey has become the vanguard of the crusade for energy affordability," Hertz-Shargel wrote on his LinkedIn page four months ago. "So telling that one of Governor Sherrill's first actions is to establish a virtual power plant program to reduce the dependence of energy reliability on utility capital spend," the Ph.D. mathematician stated.
Hertz-Shargel is "global head of grid transformation & large loads" at the Wood Mackenzie research firm. He has written on his firm's AI data-center research and the data center's impact on demand for electricity.Â
He serves on the advisory council for the Pew Charitable Trust DER Initiative. "DERs are energy generation and storage technologies such as rooftop solar, battery storage, and smart appliances," according to Pew.
In his LinkedIn writing, Hertz-Shargel foreshadowed the release of Pew's DER Policy Playbook — "a set of actionable recommendations to scale DERs that can be tailored to each state’s market and regulatory landscape."
"Pew's DER State Policy Explorer finds that states across the political spectrum passed policies that boost solutions such as energy storage, community solar, and microgrids, to increase resiliency for communities across the country," he wrote.
