The States

A conversation with the Director of Reclamation and Abandoned Mine Lands Division.

“Who wouldn’t want carbon-free electricity? It sounds great, but we can’t ignore the cost and impact that has on consumers, especially low-income households.”

“One of the issues I campaigned on was my background with coal reclamation and my desire to make sure we have something similar in place for wind farms. We have 4,000 MW of wind in North Dakota. Someday, those need to be cleaned up too.”

“As we transition to more renewables, we have to recognize the need for dispatchable resources to maintain reliability. If those are largely gas, then we need more pipelines.”

This small but mighty Commission handles a lot in this vast agricultural and ranching state. North Dakota PSC is also in charge of weights and measures, protecting consumers by making sure they get what they pay for. Commissioners in North Dakota are elected and spend a lot of time traveling to hearings held among constituents for the serious business of regulating in the public interest.

“Liberalized conditions complicate the state regulators’ job of evaluating whether a proposal to merge a utility is in the public interest and place the responsibility to protect retail customers almost entirely on regulators.”

“The state’s greenhouse gas policies are going to be coming more into effect soon in terms of their impact to the gas grid.”

“The Transportation Division enforces the regulations of the PSC pertaining to the safety, rates, and service of passenger-for-hire transportation companies, operating in intrastate commerce.”

“We’ve recently allowed multi-year rate plans. Now we’re also focusing on the forecasting methods the utilities use because forecasting’s become a major component of the multi-year rate plan.”

“We had a number of impacts due to COVID-19. The primary impact was that electric and gas utilities requested to have stays of enforcement or basically, regulatory relief.”