Rate design should balance consumer and investor interests.
Is the current regulatory compact in anyone’s best interests?
A more dynamic approach to grid modernization.
Protecting your base – while keeping options open.
Calculating and allocating costs for non-traditional utility services.
Alternative ways to calculate utilities’ costs of service allow policy makers to achieve social goals in a way that’s fair and economically efficient.
Why deregulation is easy and reregulation is hard.
Even with convincing evidence that deregulation has failed to deliver promised benefits, efforts to restore public oversight face tough resistance. The reasons involve policy inertia—and blind faith in free markets.
Free markets are not a fad.
A solution to high electricity prices in restructured states.
New baseload generation is needed in many areas of the United States, but financing new plants will be particularly challenging in restructured states where generation facilities are no longer included in rate base and therefore not financed through the traditional rate-of-return paradigm. A market hybrid approach—in which new baseload plants would be partially owned and financed by the regulated distribution company with the other portion owned and financed by the unregulated generation company—would combine the advantages of lower cost capital and regulatory oversight associated with traditional rate of return regulation, with the cost control and efficiency associated with competitive markets.
Perspective
The crisis of confidence in today's power industry is, at its heart, a crisis of ideas.
New legislation would tackle the most difficult problem (em low load factors for small-volume customers.
We commend the Natural Gas Competition and Deregulation Act, SB 215, passed by the Georgia General Assembly in March. (Governor Zell Miller was expected to sign the bill in April.) The Georgia legislation envisions a new framework for regulating the retail gas market.