Giving up today's customer to retail wheeling could help cut losses tomorrow.

Estimates of stranded investment for U.S. investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs) range from as little as $20 billion to as much as $500 billion (em more than double the shareholder equity in U.S. utilities.

The 129 federally owned plants that make up the five PMAs generate about 6 percent of the electricity sold in the United States.1 By law, the PMAs sell wholesale power at cost to legally stipulated "preference customers" (em i.e., municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives.

The Larger, the Better

In recent years, increased competition and the threat of deregulation have spurred numerous mergers and acquisitions. Fourteen mergers have been completed by investor-owned utilities (IOUs) over the last five years; seven more have been announced. If all of these mergers receive approval, nearly 20 percent of the IOUs that existed in 1990 will no longer exist.

TECC Group, Inc. has identified 14 U.S. investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs) as major players in research and development (R&D), with expenditures in excess of $10 million. TECC's report, U.S. Electric IOU Research, Development & Demonstration Expense Comparisons 1994, places Southern California Edison at the top of the list ($64 million) and PECO Energy Co. 14th ($11 million). In between, in descending order, we find: Consolidated Edison Co.

"Anyone who assumes rural electric cooperatives will not be fully engaged in whatever system we have . . . if they assume the more competitive it becomes, the less we'll be engaged . . . they're very wrong."

(em Glenn English, CEO,

National Rural Electric

Cooperative Association

Ten terms as a U.S. Representative from Oklahoma's Sixth District taught Glenn English how to build consensus.

It comes as no surprise that regulated investor-owned utilities (IOUs) hold divergent views on the restructuring of the electric industry. Size, generation cost, transmission access, customer loyalty, and the friendliness of state regulators all factor into their individual visions of restructuring.

Nearly three years on from the Yellow Book,1 after many long hours and thousands (em if not millions (em of pages, and following much bitter debate (linked with some murky politics), the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) by a 3-2 majority has at last published an Order2 to introduce competition for retail customers.

The decision contains four main proposals:

s market structure

s access for custo

What are the essential characteristics of the system of governance that will be required for a new, North American electric industry with interconnected and interdependent transmission networks and trading areas?

Electric transmission networks are natural monopolies, as are the many independent network

control systems that coordinate the use of generators and loads and preserve system reliability.

jü( )l, n: A unit of energy measurement equal to a watt-second.

According to a Newton-Evans Research Co. survey of 60 information system managers from gas, electric, and water utilities in more than 12 countries:

s About 45 percent of utilities surveyed plan to replace current computer systems through 1997.

s IOUs tend to spend more for information technology than their publicly operated peers: close to 3 percent of revenues.