Wholesale Electricity Surges in New York as Temperatures Soar
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times via Redux
Keeping cool in Times Square.
Keeping cool in Times Square. Photographer: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times via Redux
Wholesale electricity jumped in New York as hot, humid weather from Massachusetts to North Carolina prompted homes and businesses to crank up air conditioners.
Spot power in New York City rose to an average of $339.82 a megawatt-hour from 7 a.m. through 3 p.m. after soaring as high as $1,647.56 at 10:55 a.m., according to the New York Independent System Operator Inc., which manages the state grid. Electricity traded yesterday for delivery for those peak-demand hours today was priced at an average of $57.34.
The high in New York today was 88 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius), 13 above normal, while Baltimore reached 96, according to the National Weather Service. Humidity in New York may rise as high as 93 percent later today, said AccuWeather Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania.
“Today’s demand is expected to be up with the heat and humidity, but power supplies are more than adequate to meet that demand,” Michael Clendenin, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison Inc. in New York, said in an e-mail. A cold front forecast to move in later today and tomorrow will “bring temperatures back to normal by the end of the week,” he said.
Most power for a given day is purchased the previous day in what is known as the day-ahead market. Spot prices can jump when demand exceeds the amount secured in trading a day earlier.
New York Grid
Hourly prices across the New York state grid rose above $100 a megawatt-hour after 7 a.m. with the start of the work day. Electricity use on the grid was 27,685 megawatts as of 4:54 p.m., 8.3 percent above yesterday’s forecast for that time.
“Temperatures are climbing to highs not experienced since last August,” David Flanagan, a spokesman for the New York grid operator, said in an e-mail. Demand response programs were activated to encourage large consumers to reduce consumption during peak hours, he said.
The New York ISO issued a thunderstorm alert to market participants just before 3 p.m., resulting in transmission bottlenecks and bolstering prices, said Brendyn Brooks-Stocking, a Boston-based Northeast power analyst with Genscape Inc., a real-time data power provider.
Today’s spot-market price gains won’t affect bills for Con Ed customers immediately because rates are set by contract, according to Clendenin. The utility has more than 3 million customers in New York City and Westchester County.
New England Prices
Spot power across New England rose to $429 a megawatt-hour at 3 p.m. after averaging $77.79 for the hour ended 2 p.m., based on gains in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts.
The high in Worcester, Massachusetts, may be 79 degrees, 9 above normal. Western Massachusetts power averaged $290.14 megawatt-hour from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., or six times more than the day-ahead prices for that time, according to data from ISO New England Inc.
Demand on the mid-Atlantic grid operated by PJM Interconnection LLC, which spans 13 states from New Jersey to North Carolina and as far west as Illinois, was 131,099 as of 4:30 p.m., 6.6 percent more than the day-ahead forecast.
Prices have traded from lows that were mostly in the $20s and $30s per megawatt-hour to more than $600 in some of the more densely populated areas where transmission bottlenecks aren’t unusual, according to PJM data.
Public Service Enterprise Group (PEG)’s territory in New Jersey averaged $275 a megawatt-hour from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., after rising to a high today of $451.75. Spot power at the Dominion Resources Inc. zone in Virginia and North Carolina jumped to $601.07 at 4:35 p.m. after averaging $213.38 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
To contact the reporter on this story: Naureen S. Malik in New York at nmalik28@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Stets at dstets@bloomberg.net
Bankia fiasco carries the same old lessons - Financial Times
May 30, 2012 7:51 pm
Shopping around too tiring? Use smartphone - Yahoo Finance
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Melanie Sheridan doesn't do much shopping these days without her smartphone. As a work-at-home mother and the creator of the blog "Mel, A Dramatic Mommy," Sheridan says she relies heavily on her phone to organize her household shopping and keep a close eye ...Apple CEO Tim Cook ignites rumour mill with public appearance at All Things D conference - Itproportal
In only his second public interview since arriving in the Apple hot seat, new CEO Tim Cook offered a candid insight into the future at Cupertino when he was interviewed at the All Things D conference earlier today.
While the successor to Steve Jobs stopped short of being drawn into any wholesale revelations, he did make a number of comments that will arouse the interest of Apple enthusiasts.
Chief among these, he hinted that TV remained an area of "intense interest" for the company and that its present offering of a set-top box could be complimented - or, indeed, supplanted - by an iTV device in the future provided that Apple could control the core technology.
"We are going to keep pulling the string and see where it takes us," Mr Cook said cryptically.
The new sheriff of Infinite Loop also commented on his company's attempt to build social networking into the central iTunes set-up, admitting that the Ping music sharing offshoot had been a failure.
"We tried [it] and I think the customer voted and said this isn't something I want," he added.
This left some kind of collaboration with Facebook on the cards, with Mr Cook indicating a great deal of respect for Mark Zuckerberg's company and hinting that some kind of partnership could be developed in the future.
Still, the fan boy's new messiah refused to commit too readily to anything at D10.
"That's a great question. I'm not going to answer it," he remarked to one query.
It looks like interested consumers and product enthusiasts will just have to wait until the WWDC in a month's time for more detailed reveals about one of the world's most iconic tech brands, though until then obsessives can feast on potential glimpses of the iPhone 5 and the new iOS 6 Maps app right here on ITProPortal.
Wholesale Christian Products - Witness Wear That Sells Quick! - PRLog (free press release)
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If you are a Christian retailer and you are looking for unique and fast selling Christian products please visit our new Christian wholesale website. We would truly be honored to partner with you in spreading the gospel of our amazing Lord and Savior….Jesus Christ!
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God Bless and may Peace Be With U!
Shopping Calendar Gets a School Day - New York Times
The magazine, Teen Vogue, is ready to begin promoting Aug. 11 as a national day for back-to-school shopping. Back-to-School Saturday will offer young shoppers — and the parents who often pay the bills — sales, free samples and events in stores and malls.
Teen Vogue has two dozen advertisers taking part, all of them reliant on the back-to-school season for revenue. The participants will include Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Express, Guess, H&M, Maybelline New York, Pacific Sunwear of California, Quiksilver, Staples and Vans. Four brands sold by Procter & Gamble, the nation’s largest advertiser, will be involved: Cover Girl, Olay, Pantene and Tampax.
Back-to-School Saturday will be promoted in the typically enthusiastic Teen Vogue tone of voice. For instance, ads and posters will exhort, “Get ready, get set, get shopping!” And social media will, of course, play a big role; Teen Vogue has already called dibs on a hashtag, #btss.
“We’re trying to create a moment of imagination and motivation,” said Jason Wagenheim, vice president and publisher of Teen Vogue, part of the Condé Nast Publications division of Advance Publications. “We saw it as a real opportunity, because for our girls, back-to-school is as important as” the Christmas shopping season, he added.
Mr. Wagenheim acknowledged that the back-to-school shopping period “is a very random 8 to 12 weeks that starts early in the South and later in the North.” But research suggested that shopping for school supplies, clothing and other merchandise “seems to peak in the second and third week of August,” he said, so the Aug. 11 date was selected as one that could be turned into “a galvanizing moment.”
Alison Corcoran, senior vice president for retail marketing at Staples, echoed Mr. Wagenheim.
Although “the season starts in June in some markets and goes all the way to the third week of September in Manhattan,” Ms. Corcoran said that designating Aug. 11 as a special occasion “is putting a stake in the ground, saying, ‘Here’s a day you can rally around.’ ”
And “for value-conscious parents,” said Ms. Corcoran, who described herself as “a mom of four,” it is “great to know there’s a day with the best of the best deals.”
As part of Back-to-School Saturday, she added, Staples will promote, among other offers, its annual Back to School Savings Pass, which costs $10 and offers 15 percent off “all your school supplies for the rest of the season.”
Mr. Wagenheim said he was not daunted by how chockablock the shopping calendar already is with days intended to stand out from the everyday. “Kids are looking for something to do,” he said, “and back-to-school is important to them.”
And “we look to our big sisters from Vogue,” Mr. Wagenheim said, who introduced in 2009 a national shopping event called Fashion’s Night Out. The Vogue initiative has grown larger each year, expanding internationally, and this year is Sept. 6.
Consumers are becoming “increasingly interested in event-based shopping,” said Gary H. Schoenfeld, chief executive at Pacific Sunwear, who recalled how he was “up all night on Black Friday in three or four of our stores, and customers were having a blast.”
“Three o’clock in the morning felt like 8 o’clock at night, as people were with friends and having a great time shopping,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. “The idea of Teen Vogue trying to introduce something like that for back-to-school is a fun idea; why not be a part of it?”
Deborah Marquardt, vice president for media and integrated marketing at Maybelline New York, part of the L’Oréal USA division of L’Oréal, said that for Teen Vogue’s target generation, “shopping is like a sport.”
Back-to-School Saturday represents an “opportunity to get out in front of this key audience,” she added, in a relevant way that “gives shape and focus to something that’s already existed, elevating it, event-izing it and celebrating it.”
“If it doesn’t provide anything of value,” Ms. Marquardt said, consumers will not respond. “But they’re going to get samples, and they’re going to get offers, and there’ll be a fashion show at the Grove,” she added, referring to a mall in Los Angeles, “where 10-to-15,000 are expected.”
Teen Vogue offered advertisers a chance to participate in Back-to-School Saturday if they agreed to do more business with the magazine, in some combination of print and/or digital spending.
For its part, Teen Vogue is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the initiative, an amount similar to what the magazine has spent on previous efforts like Teen Vogue Fashion University.
Mr. Wagenheim said, “Our long-term hope is that it becomes part of the retail calendar, like Black Friday.”
The August issue of the magazine, on sale on July 3, will have a back-to-school theme, and there will be additional content on teenvogue.com. There are plans for an iPhone app, called Teen Vogue Insider, timed for Back-to-School Saturday.
Can a pill stop you shopping? - Daily Mail
by CAMILLA LONG, Evening Standard
Film stars and sex, toddlers and telly, It girls and Gucci - there's an addiction out there that's just right for you.
Take shopping. It doesn't make you fat, nor does it kill you, unlike other fun stuff we could mention.
But it certainly hits the spot for sufferers from "aspendicitis", "plastic disease" or "Madame Bovary syndrome" (after the fictional heroine who liked to shop till she dropped).
An incredible eight per cent of the US population has been estimated to suffer from this newly fashionable disorder, but what's more amazing is that the drugs industry, always quick to spot a marketing opportunity, has formulated an "anti-shopping drug", which is now being prescribed by doctors in Britain.
Citalopram, manufactured in Europe by Lundbeck under the brand name Cipramil, is one of the family of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which also includes Prozac. It has recently undergone extensive tests at California's Stanford University which, it is claimed, prove its ability to stop people overspending.
"The drug seemed effective for nearly three-quarters of those who took it," explains Dr Lorrin Koran, who led the Stanford study and estimates that 90 per cent of sufferers from this obsessivecompulsive disorder are women.
"Many subjects found eventually that they could visit the shopping centre and not buy anything at all."
A lot of us find it difficult to leave the house, let alone visit the mall, without buying anything at all, so just where does harmless retail therapy end and compulsive shopping begin?
Dr Robert Lesever runs the Promis Recovery Centre with clinics in Kent and London and provides therapy for shopping addicts.
"A compulsive person becomes dependent and uses shopping to alleviate emotional problems," he explains, but the spree which "medicates" these problems provides only momentary relief. It's only a matter of time before the sufferer becomes hooked and their shopping begins to effect not just their bank balances, but their relationships.
But with inappropriate levels of consumer credit an everincreasing problem over here, will we soon be prescribed Cipramil with our debt counselling?
Dr Lefever is doubtful, and advocates a proper course of therapy. He says, "Emotions are never properly cured by drugs. You can't just medicate everything."
But other psychiatrists working in the field testify that Cipramil is noticeably more effective at treating shopping addiction than Prozac, for instance, which is also used to medicate obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Dr Neil Brener, a consultant psychiatrist at the Priory, north London, is a specialist in shoplifting and shopaholics. He has successfully used Cipramil alongside therapy to treat his patients, although he points out that, "since compulsive shopping is a genuine psychiatric problem caused by many different factors, in some cases citalopram will be more helpful to curb it than in others".
He welcomes the Stanford research, which confirms his own clinical experience.
With the conclusion of that research, Lundbeck and US manufacturers of the drug will be free to market their product as the world's first chemical overdraft excluder.
Below, three shopaholics reveal their experiences of Cipramil.
Luke, 21, medical student
LUKE decided to take Cipramil after his shopping habits led to suicidal thoughts. He stayed on it for three months. He says:
"I've always had a slight problem with spending too much, but when I came to university it got worse. I'd buy tons of clothes, CDs and computer equipment and feel a physical thrill when I paid for it. I even bought some vinyls without owning a record player - don't ask me why.
"The strain of work and personal relationships meant that increasingly I would try to cheer myself up by buying things - and, in the end, I couldn't go into a shop without making a purchase. I couldn't escape the craving for the high that shopping gave me, and the debts piled up.
"I started getting so worried about it that I contemplated suicide. That was the wake-up call. I confided in a friend and she said I should see my GP immediately. I was scared what might happen if I didn't.
"He said Cipramil would stop me feeling depressed one minute and compensating for it by shopping the next. The drug doesn't kick in properly for about a fortnight. To start with, I had mild, bearable stomach cramps. When I finally felt the emotional effects, my spending did stop a bit. I felt I didn't need that high when I handed over the credit card.
"I felt so much better on the drug that after a short while I wanted to come off it and get on with my life drugfree. My doctor was happy with my decision, so didn't prescribe any more. I had no problem coming off it, and I didn't start feeling depressed again. But soon my old habits came back - and I suddenly found myself blowing £600 on clothes. Three months on, I'm sorry that I still spend, but I don't have suicidal thoughts about it, and that's the main thing."
Christelle, 26, sports shop manager
Christelle's doctor prescribed her Cipramil in a last-ditch attempt to curb her addictive behaviour. She says:
"For seven years, I was addicted to shopping. I've got an emotional illness which finds relief in addictive behaviour, and shopping was one form of this.
"I became hooked on it when I was 18 when I got my first store card. I discovered it could momentarily relieve anxieties about my life. Eventually, I was running up debts of hundreds a month. I found that paying for luxury items gave me a particular high. I started seeing a psychiatrist who was prescribing me every drug under the sun to try to eliminate the compulsive urges. So when he suggested Cipramil, I thought, why not? I reckon I was on about 15 different pills a day by then, so I guessed it wouldn't make a difference.
"But it had a very strange effect on me. I don't know if this was due to all the other drugs I was on, but it knocked me out, and I could hardly move. So I suppose it did cure me of shopping - I couldn't get out of the house.
"After about six months on the drug, I had had enough and I wanted to purge my system. I didn't think it was doing me any good, and I felt awful. My doctor was still worried about my problems but understood my wish to try a different approach.
"I came off it and went straight back to the spending. Only when I tried a 12-step programme of therapy did I register improvement with everything - a vast improvement, because, two years on, I'm not on any medication at all and I feel normal.
"I still get the impulsive urges to go shopping, but I have learned to control them mentally. I'd never go back to the pills now."
Anya, 32, singer
Anya has been on Cipramil for a year, although she is trying to come off. She says:
"I didn't do anything about my shopping problem for years, because I lived so far away from my GP. I'd just go out and buy things for a buzz - mainly food, alcohol and clothes - and simply could not stop shopping. But at the end of the day, I'd get home and just leave the purchases in the corner of my room, still in the bag.
"I remember trying to explain to friends the moped I'd bought. I didn't have a licence!
"I can't believe I didn't make the effort - I knew perfectly well I had a problem, because I was utterly embarrassed by my behaviour. I moved house and went to a GP who referred me to a psychiatrist. He prescribed me a new drug - Cipramil.
"The side-effects were a problem, although the lure of buying things diminished. I found I could go into shops and come out after a few minutes instead of hours. I experienced nausea for the first 10 days, although it wasn't terrible.
However, I made a mistake when I didn't cut down on my alcohol. One evening I was enjoying my favourite drink - an alcopop - when suddenly I felt very sick, and very drunk. Worse than this, my libido vanished.
"I wanted to try to come off the drug to prove that I could survive without medication and to get my sex-drive back. My doctor reduced the dosage, but it coincided with a bad time in my personal life and I started having panic attacks. This was unusual as I'd felt under control when I was on the drug.
"My doctor explained that I didn't have to come off it at exactly that time, and I decided to stay on it for the time being. I don't like being dependent on it - but it's better than being utterly dependent on the shopping."
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