The dash to gas brings volatility in shareholder performance.
Michael T. Burr (burr@pur.com) is Fortnightly’s editor-in-chief. He acknowledges the assistance of Jean Reaves Rollins, managing partner at the C Three Group in Atlanta, who developed the Fortnightly 40 model and provides financial analysis for each year’s report. He also acknowledges the efforts of Jason Allen at Accenture, who provided additional analysis for Figures 8 and 9.
The financial ranking model behind the annual Fortnightly 40 Best Energy Companies survey and report is designed with a few purposes in mind. It’s intended to compare the shareholder value performance of publicly traded U.S. electric and gas companies, across a range of metrics – from profit margin to sustainable growth. It provides a uniform data set for analyzing trends among leading companies in the industry. And it sets an empirical benchmark that allows us to gauge the success of different business strategies.
Judging by the way the rankings have developed over time, one strategy seems to have distinguished itself as the industry’s most successful. As measured by our model (see sidebar “Behind the Fortnightly 40 Rankings”), integrated utilities – with complementary generation, transmission, and distribution assets – are generally the “Best Energy Companies.”
