Cost-of-service

Ratemaking and the Campaign Against Rooftop Solar

Rate design should balance consumer and investor interests.

Regulators should ensure that changes to rate design seek to balance consumer and utility interests. Rates that are intended to insulate utilities from economic and technological change while providing no benefits to consumers ought to be considered unjust, unreasonable, and unduly discriminatory.

Customer First

Is the current regulatory compact in anyone’s best interests?

Serving customers’ needs should be a top priority for power companies, irrespective of the regulatory construct and business model. Transformation doesn’t change this basic fact, but how do we break the model without breaking the system?

Results-Based Regulation

A more dynamic approach to grid modernization.

The utility’s role is changing, and regulation must change along with it – to spur innovation and respond to evolving customer needs. Modernizing the industry will require a dynamic approach.

Beyond the Meter

Protecting your base – while keeping options open.

The coming years will bring policy wrangling over distributed resources – what’s economic and what’s not.

Pricing Social Benefits

Calculating and allocating costs for non-traditional utility services.

Alternative ways to calculate utilities’ costs of service allow policy makers to achieve social goals in a way that’s fair and economically efficient.

Bottling the Genie

Why deregulation is easy and reregulation is hard.

Even with convincing evidence that deregulation has failed to deliver promised benefits, efforts to restore public oversight face tough resistance. The reasons involve policy inertia—and blind faith in free markets.

No Going Back

Free markets are not a fad.

Half-hearted deregulation hobbles the forces of supply and demand before they can get out of the gate.

Hybrid Finance

A solution to high electricity prices in restructured states.

New baseload generation is needed in many areas of the United States, but financing new plants will be particularly challenging in restructured states where generation facilities are no longer included in rate base and therefore not financed through the traditional rate-of-return paradigm. A market hybrid approach—in which new baseload plants would be partially owned and financed by the regulated distribution company with the other portion owned and financed by the unregulated generation company—would combine the advantages of lower cost capital and regulatory oversight associated with traditional rate of return regulation, with the cost control and efficiency associated with competitive markets.

Perspective

The crisis of confidence in today's power industry is, at its heart, a crisis of ideas.

Perspective

The crisis of confidence in today's power industry is, at its heart, a crisis of ideas.

 

Retail Gas Reform: Learning from the Georgia Model

New legislation would tackle the most difficult problem (em low load factors for small-volume customers.

We commend the Natural Gas Competition and Deregulation Act, SB 215, passed by the Georgia General Assembly in March. (Governor Zell Miller was expected to sign the bill in April.) The Georgia legislation envisions a new framework for regulating the retail gas market.