Unconventional gas and LNG are changing the outlook for future gas prices.

Utilities are bringing monumental capital-expenditure plans before rate regulators just as they’re dealing with a barrage of rising costs—for fuel and other commodities, as well as labor, pension-fund obligations, and interest payments. Ten energy-finance luminaries elaborate on the industry’s fortunes.

Business & Money

Winners and Losers:

Diversified companies lead (and the globals lag) over the past five years.

The unbundling of services and companies in the electricity and natural gas industries have created unprecedented opportunities to reinvent the traditional integrated utility model, with a broader array of attendant risks and rewards. But this past year was clearly one of retrenchment and strategic soul searching, allowing an opportunity to re-examine the sector for winning business formulas.

Frontlines

Electricity rates may be heading skyward sooner than we think.

Are state regulators in danger of bringing about the thing they most fear-higher electricity rates? Critics charge that some regulators seem to be opening up the cookie jar, letting utilities have as they please with no supervision.

Perspective

A decade of restructuring has not affected the financial integrity of the average regulated utility.

Ideological bias, economic principles, success of previous deregulation, inordinate greed, and political expediency fueled the movement for electricity deregulation. The authorities, however, never deregulated. They chose to restructure.