2015 Regulators Forum
State Utility Commissioners in Their Own Words
Susan Ackerman, chair, Oregon PUC; Chris Nelson, vice-chairman, South Dakota PUC; Tim G. Echols, Georgia PSC; Paul J. Roberti, Rhode Island PUC
Energy Policy & Legislation
Life Without Building Block 4
Energy Efficiency under EPA’s Final Clean Power Plan.
Energy efficiency remains the most cost-effective route to compliance with the Clean Power Plan. In the final Clean Power Plan rule issued August 3, 2015, EPA did not include Energy Efficiency in the calculations used to develop state targets. However, EPA and the White House have made it abundantly clear that energy efficiency remains just as viable a compliance option as before.
Open-Access Chronicles: The Backstory Behind Electric Restructuring
Part 3: When Competition Turns to War
By September 1997, Philadelphia Electric Co. had outflanked key opponents and filed a proposed partial settlement with the Penn. PUC to allow the company to recover costs that might become stranded under a new law (enacted a year before) that had brought a measure of competition to the state’s electric utility industry. Then Enron went to work.
Searching for Equilibrium
How to achieve it in the era of distributed energy
In the emerging era of distributed energy resources, we will find the distribution utility increasingly in the role of an integrator and enabler – more than their longstanding role as energy provider. Accordingly, the regulatory approach must go through its own structural shift to keep pace and restore the system to regulatory equilibrium.
Open-Access Chronicles: The Backstory Behind Electric Restructuring
Part 2: The Art of the Deal
By 1997, Peco employed some 21 registered lobbyists in Pennsylvania, almost more than any other single company: to push through favorable bills to restructure the state’s electricity marketplace.
EPA's Clean Power Plan
Charting a Path Forward
With respect to the Clean Power Plan, the question is whether EPA will address the major issues and reinforce its positions in advance of the anticipated legal challenges.
Grid Reform to Date
How the feds opened the supply side.
The sheer scale of growth put a ‘stake through the heart’ of the old view.
Open-Access Chronicles: The Backstory Behind Electric Restructuring
Part 1: Sharks, Whales and Minnows
In 1995, the pitched battle that played out between Peco and PPL became the functional equivalent of an advertising blitz in support of electricity restructuring, and planted the seeds for Enron to get involved in utility regulation.
Rooftop Solar 2.0
Hawaii and California grapple over net energy metering.
While the underlying questions in each state regarding net energy metering are much the same, the two PUC's will approach the issue from different perspectives.
High Stakes at the High Court
U.S. Supreme Court to decide demand response case.
Cost-conscious commercial and industrial customers may be oblivious to the legal issues surrounding their energy choices, but their demand response providers are not. The U.S. Supreme Court will now decide whether those services will be regulated by the federal government or state utility commissions.