Energy Policy & Legislation

Regulators Can Win the Trifecta with Residential Demand Charges

Advanced metering and demand charges give efficient and equitable price signals to customers.

The wide deployment of smart meters gives regulatory policy-makers a rare opportunity to change residential rate design. This can be done in a way that improves economic efficiency, and utility consumer and shareholder equity. Here we provide ten questions that should be asked by policy-makers, as well as some guidance in deriving the answers.
Byline: 

Ross C. Hemphill and Kenneth W. Costello

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Order 745: A Time Bomb for Electricity Consumers

One of the worst orders FERC has ever produced

Order 745 overcompensates demand response, unduly discriminates against wholesale suppliers, sanctions and institutionally enforces the exercise of monopsony market power, and will ultimately raise electricity prices.
Byline: 

Robert Borlick

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Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

Ensuring State Emission Reduction in Clean Power Plan

Strong public policy favors giving states credit for the carbon reductions they make while the Plan’s legality is pending.
Byline: 

Joshua Epel, James Tarpey, Nicholas Eaton and Jacob Rey

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Getting Berned

What’s the price tag of banning fracking?

Ironically, a ban on fracking would increase coal generation, which emits carbon dioxide at twice the rate of gas generation.
Byline: 

Steve Huntoon

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Tax Implications of NEM Successor Policies

Federal income tax treatment has nothing to do with pricing sale of electricity to utility or customer.

Advocates for net metering argue that if the electricity delivered by the customer to the utility is credited at the full retail rate, the amount is not taxable, but if credited at less than the full retail rate, such as under a feed-in tariff or a value of solar tariff, the IRS might count the credited amount as taxable income. A tax expert fills us in on the other side of the story.
Byline: 

Alex Zakupowsky

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Chasing the Uncatchable

Why trying to fix mandatory capacity markets is like trying to win a game of Whack-A-Mole (Parts I & II)

FERC has little to show for more than a decade of tinkering with mandatory capacity markets.
Byline: 

Delia D. Patterson and Harvey L. Reiter

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The British Electricity Model: 25 Years of Experience

Should We Follow U.K.’s Lead?

British price cap regulation quickly became the international gold standard for regulation. It looked so simple. But if the purpose was to provide a dramatically different and less expensive electricity experience, it failed.
Byline: 

Leonard Hyman and William Tilles

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