DC

A rebuttal to conclusions made in three Fortnightly articles that service quality declined in Ontario because of a performance-based regulation plan implementation.

The economy has put state commissioners and regulated utilities in precarious positions. Seven state chairmen explain how they’re applying fair rate treatment.

Should the power industry adapt its approach to capital markets in this environment? The answer, of course, is yes. Multiple frameworks are necessary to establish a power company’s or project’s current cost of capital, especially under volatile capital market conditions. The analyses reveal that in today’s capital markets, it is critical to balance or combine the alternative approaches to the cost of capital in order to develop a long-term view.

Building upon last month’s installment, more is revealed on how, after 10 years of incentive regulation, reliability has declined in Ontario.

When prices for emissions allowances collapsed in Europe’s carbon market a year after trading began, critics said the collapse proved a regulatory product couldn’t be traded internationally. Sure, they said, the U.S. acid-rain market worked, but it was never an international market—and it couldn’t be, given the propensity for governments to protect their own economies.

After 10 years of incentive regulation, reliability has declined in Ontario. Regulators failed to enforce service-quality standards, and consumers are suffering as a result.

Chris O’Brien is no starry-eyed idealist. An engineer with an MBA, he began his career developing fossil-fired power plants for the AES Corp. But in the 1990s his career took a different turn, when he launched the Energy Star program for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. After that, he went into the solar energy business, and never has looked back.

The best example of combined dynamic rates and smart billing is found in Ontario, Canada. It uses central MDM to produce time-differentiated customer bills.

Unlike the majority of performance-based regulation plans, alternative design paradigms require less data, by instead allowing firms to reveal performance potential. In an asymmetric environment, regulators don’t have needed information, but that can be overcome with better models and incentives.

Once upon a time, a real estate developer dreamed of building a planned community. The developer, Syd Kitson, envisioned a “city of tomorrow™” in southwestern Florida, designed for efficiency, convenience and harmony with nature. Instead of driving cars everywhere, the 45,000 residents of Kitson’s Babcock Ranch would ride bikes to school, and walk to the cinema. They’d take a tram to visit friends in another hamlet, on the other side of a lush wildlife preserve.