Affordability
Claire Coleman is Consumer Counsel for the Connecticut Office of Consumer Counsel.
Affordability is one of those issues that everyone is talking about right now. It comes up in rate cases, in long-term planning, and in conversations about everything from grid modernization to large-load growth. But for most customers, it still shows up in a much simpler way: a number on a monthly bill that may or may not fit within the rest of the household budget.
The challenge, of course, is that those numbers don’t happen by accident. They are the result of a long series of decisions about what to build, how to build it, and how those costs are ultimately recovered.
This feature brings together a range of perspectives on how those decisions are being made today. In our conversation with NASUCA Executive Director David Springe, there is a clear sense of how much the regulatory landscape has changed, and how that growing complexity is shaping affordability challenges across the country.
That theme carries through in a roundtable with the NASUCA Officers, where the focus shifts to the day-to-day work of evaluating investments, asking difficult questions, and making sure the analysis behind major decisions holds up.