PHILADELPHIA -- You can easily track the minute-by-minute price swings of a barrel of oil, but can you do the same for a megawatt of electricity?  Today you can.

The Electricity Price Ticker Partnership, led by the Penn Institute for Urban Research at the University of Pennsylvania and PJM Interconnection, has unveiled its Web-based Electricity Price Ticker that tracks the real time wholesale electricity price for the PECO area.  The ticker is the centerpiece of the partnership’s Electricity Price Awareness campaign, which aims to increase the public’s understanding of the connection between the wholesale price of electricity and their electricity bills. The ticker will show that energy use patterns affect the price of electricity and encourage support of national Smart Grid efforts.

The other partners are Penn’s Facilities and Real Estate Services and its Green Campus Partnership, the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy Efficient Buildings, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, Penn State’s DOE-funded Grid Smart Training Application & Resource Center and PECO.  GPIC provided financial support for the ticker design.

A visit to the partners’ Web sites – except those of PECO and PJM -- reveals a ticker displaying the price of a megawatt hour of electricity, updated every five minutes as the price can vary greatly during a single day and by season.
 
A click on the ticker directs the users to the Partnership’s Web site to learn about the electricity market: how electricity is produced, transmitted and distributed to homes and businesses.
 
From the Partnership’s Web site, users can browse the individual partner’s sites for information about awareness programs and events. For example, at PJM's site, users will learn what a megawatt hour of electricity can do; at Penn IUR's site, visitors can take an electricity literacy test; and at the Penn Green Campus Partnership site, users can find out how to conserve electricity on a university campus.

For more information, contact:

Eugenie Birch
Co-Director
Penn Institute for Urban Research
215-573-8386
elbirch@design.upenn.edu

Susan Covino
Senior Consultant, Emerging Markets
PJM Interconnection LLC
610-666-8829
covins@pjm.com