Waking Up in the Future
Ahmad Faruqui is a principal with The Brattle Group. He is an energy economist whose career has been devoted to pricing innovations. He has designed and evaluated a variety of pricing experiments in the U.S. and abroad and maintains a global database of more than three hundred tests of time-varying rates. Faruqui has testified on rate-related issues in several jurisdictions and presents frequently on tariff reforms.
"No one can walk backwards into the future."
Rip Van Winkle, Jr. had spent a beautiful April day hiking in the high Sierras. After a light meal, he crept into his sleeping bag under the Milky Way, began to count the stars, and fell into a deep slumber.
He woke up two decades later. He was a professional energy economist who had cut his teeth on time-of-use rates early in his career. After the California energy crisis, he had become interested in championing dynamic pricing rates to connect retail and wholesale markets.
More recently, seeing the rapid penetration of rooftop solar panels, he had become a critic of simple, two-part volumetric rates that were neither cost-reflective nor economically efficient. He had begun talking of rate designs that would recover energy charges through time-varying rates, recover capacity costs with demand charges, and recover metering, billing and customer care costs with fixed charges.