Law & Lawyers

News Analysis

Online services are popping up - for commodity trading, retail marketing and back-office billing. But is the Web right for every application?

A recent study by Connecticut-based META Group Inc. finds that while less than 5 percent of all utility commerce will be conducted electronically in 1999, 30 percent of customer service and retail bill payments will flow over the Internet by 2004. That prediction highlights a torrent of Web activity in recent months, from power trading online to retail solicitations to electronic customer billing and payment.

Byline: 
Lori A. Burkhart, and Regina R. Johnson
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Off Peak

Investors look at environmental ratings for link to stock performance.

While socially responsible investors have been interested in environmental performance for some time, mainstream utilities investors are looking at the issue for a different reason - environmental leaders consistently achieve better financial and stock market performance than their less eco-efficient competitors.

Byline: 
Frank Dixon
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Information Architecture: Building the Right Foundation for Customer Choice in Energy

The crazy quilt emerging in restructured markets only impedes competition.

The enthusiasm among energy retailers has become infectious. It grows as each successive state opens its market to competition. Yet behind the promise lies a grim reality.

Retailers struggle against a tide of thin margins, high customer-acquisition costs, inconsistent rules and regulatory prescriptions for the unregulated market. With all the rulemakings and workshops, the dollars budgeted by utilities to implement retail choice rise above even the level of spending to eradicate the Y2K millennium bug.

Byline: 
Eric Cody
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The Internet: Tomorrow's Solution Today

Let customers choose their own billing format.

The information-management and transaction-cost problems facing deregulated markets are familiar to me. They describe precisely the same barriers I was trying to overcome when I founded Utility.com Inc., an entirely Internet-based energy service provider.

The Internet offers an especially powerful tool for customer service. With deregulation, customers face an enormous learning curve. Not only can they now choose their electric company, but they also must become familiar with new terminology and concepts.

Byline: 
Chris S. King
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Power Markets Disconnected? How to Reconcile Retail with Wholesale

Shopping credits, capacity rules and other mistakes from California and PJM.

With retail electric markets opening rapidly, why are so many getting off to a slow start? Why do suppliers abandon some markets and consumers decline to participate in others? The answer may lie in a series of disconnections between wholesale trading patterns and retail opportunities.

Byline: 
David Magnus Boonin and Stephen R. Fernands
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Frontlines

MIT professor Paul Joskow asks the FERC how its rulemaking will help consumers.

By Aug. 23, the electric industry had filed over 150 separate comments - nearly 4,000 pages - telling the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission what it thinks about regional transmission organizations.

All other stories pale in comparison. The commission's proposed rulemaking on RTOs would reinvent the electric transmission business. The case gives economists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to instruct a government agency how to design and build a market from the ground up.

Byline: 
Bruce W. Radford
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Stranded Costs for a "Hungry" Utility

Even the FERC's own lawyers urge a new rule when a customer leaves a utility that already has too little capacity.

In a brief filed Aug. 18, staff counsel Theresa Burns and Diane Schratwieser urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rethink its policy on wholesale stranded costs when a customer threatens to leave but the utility is so short of generating capacity that it can easily make up any lost revenues by reallocating the reserves to other native load customers at prevailing, regulated embedded-cost retail rates.

Byline: 
Bruce W. Radford
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Rate Differentials Revisited

Bigger payoffs for larger electric customers should surprise no one, says one exec, while a consultant blames the Fortnightly for obscuring the point.

It is not surprising that authors Bierman, Nelson and Stover ("Anomalies in Residential Electric Rates: Harbinger of Competition?" Public Utilities Fortnightly, July 15, 1999) found an increasing differential between residential and industrial rates. It also is not surprising that there is a correlation with deregulation activities. This situation is the natural result of competition causing subsidies to unwind.

Byline: 
John S. Ferguson
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Off Peak

Federal data suggest it's not so in an "electrifying" economy.

Energy-related carbon emissions in the United States remained relatively flat last year, despite 4 percent U.S. economic growth. Although one year's data does not a trend make, the federal statistics seem to fly in the face of the notion that strict emissions cuts threaten the economy by raising energy prices and unemployment. Instead, says technology strategist Mark P. Mills, the figures evince a decade-old shift toward an electricity-driven economy.

According to the U.S.

Byline: 
Regina R. Johnson
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