Economic disruption and the future of electric utilities.
Leonard Hyman has gained fame as a financial analyst for the electric utility industry and as a longtime contributor to Public Utilities Fortnightly. He is the author of America's Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future, first published by Public Utilities Reports Inc. in 1994, since revised many times, and now in its eighth edition. Contact him at lenhyman@optimum.net.
About two years ago I put together some numbers and graphs on the back of a napkin that I thought had just nailed where the electric industry was going. This would make my fortune. Get it published and wait for the investments and assignments to roll in. Well, my article in Public Utilities Fortnightly1 elicited only one comment - from a lawyer who said he was glad to see that I wasn't dead. Undeterred, I revisited the topic six months later. My new effort, the Seeking Alpha piece,2 did manage to hit top billing for a day or so, but a handful of readers thought I couldn't possibly mean what I said. Then came the prestigious systems conference.3 My co-author and I won the best paper award, which consisted of a piece of paper mounted in an inexpensive frame that said, simply, "Best Paper." But we did earn a perceptive commentary from Al Jazeera.4