Marginal Utility
The Carbon Paradigm Shift
The telephone companies dumped land lines for cellular, and prospered, thanks to their size, ability to raise funds, and name recognition. They migrated to a new paradigm. Can’t electricity providers?
Strategy & Planning
A Robotic Concrete Crawler
Play Station Controls Guide Robot on Concrete Inspection Trips
EPRI has designed a robot for inspecting hard-to-reach concrete surfaces. A robotic inspection system would eliminate the need to use scaffolding or rappelling for routine structural evaluations, eliminating the associated setup challenges, time requirements, costs, and safety hazards.
Here Comes the Sun
Growing Impacts of Residential Solar on Utility Customer Service
What does PV mean for utilities’ residential customer service operations? From helping customers with supplier selection, through installation and maintenance issues? And with billing? To begin to address this question, we conducted two sets of surveys of residential electricity customers in the second quarter of 2016.
Ratemaking and the Campaign Against Rooftop Solar
Rate design should balance consumer and investor interests.
Regulators should ensure that changes to rate design seek to balance consumer and utility interests. Rates that are intended to insulate utilities from economic and technological change while providing no benefits to consumers ought to be considered unjust, unreasonable, and unduly discriminatory.
The Consumer-Centric Utility
Empowering Consumers while Managing Risk and Optimizing Assets
Electric utilities do not simply sell a commodity. They sell safe, affordable, reliable and clean electric service. The “Consumer-Centric Utility” business model provides a viable framework for utilities while enabling new products and services that meet growing consumer expectations.
Beware of Vertical Arrangements for Gas Procurement
Owning gas reserves benefits consumers?
Regulators should start with the premise that long-term contracting with an independent gas producer or middleman is preferable (e.g., with a marketer). Vertical arrangements pose a number of tough questions for state public utility regulators.
FERC Chasing the Uncatchable
Trying to fix mandatory capacity markets like trying to win at Whack-A-Mole, Part II
The proposals do not mandate participation in mandatory auction markets, much less try to set artificial floors on seller bids.
Remarkable Energy Careers: Jim Fama
We talked with Jim Fama, retiring and on his last day at EEI, about his remarkable career.
Jim Fama was the Edison Electric Institute’s vice president for energy delivery since 2002.
Expanding Deals, Shrinking Companies
After 20 years of consolidation, the industry looks distinctly different.
Today the focus has returned to building scale, as well as enhancing market access, financial stability, asset portfolio mix, and customer scale.
Most Influential Since 1990
Lions and luminaries who led the changes in utilities.
Those ten individuals who had the greatest hand in molding the electric utility industry of 2016.