As I began to write this column, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) was slated in less than 30 minutes (this time, for real) to unveil its final proposed plan to restructure the electric utility industry. After the deed was done, on Wednesday, December 20, I logged on to ftp.cpuc.ca.gov and downloaded the text of the two opinions, issued by California commissioners Daniel Fessler and Jessie Knight.
Why will cost-of-service studies continue to prove useful in a competitive market?
Cost is one of more than a dozen factors to consider in setting prices, whether in a regulated environment or a competitive regime. However, the relative significance of these factors will change under competition, when understanding the true cost of an individual service will actually become more important than under regulation.
Anchor Glass Tries to Shake JCP&L Stranglehold
By Joseph F. Schuler, Jr.
Why assume that a city or town
can't run a power plant?
It wasn't a demand for a $2-million rate cut. It was a request for a rate in line with neighboring New Jersey utilities.
That's how Walter J.
On November 7, 1995, voters in Aberdeen, NJ, went to the polls to elect local and state officials. Also on the ballot were public questions (em including one asking Aberdeen residents whether the township should build or acquire electric transmission and distribution facilities. Eighty-six percent of the voters nixed the idea. What follows is a case study of how the issue got on the ballot and how the local utility defeated the effort. The story reveals what it takes to defeat a municipalization drive: support from municipal government, the public, and your union.
The deregulated power market will feature large numbers of buyers and sellers. Buyers will worry that prices will rise unexpectedly above current levels; sellers will worry that prices will fall unexpectedly. Some will be interested in fixed-price forward deals that protect them from these risks.
To listen to some, EDI stands for "Everybody's Doing It." But there's more to it than that. The natural gas market is not simply about electronic bulletin boards (EBBs) or electronic data interchange (EDI), which reconciles potentially inconsistent data, protocols, and trading customs among pipelines, shippers, distributors, and end users. Instead, it should be about solutions (em solutions that work across regions, across enterprises.
EDI is tough.
Management expert Peter F. Drucker has observed that our society has entered a "post-capitalist" stage in which economic activity is organized around information: "The basic economic resource ... is no longer 'capital' nor 'natural resources'...
Privatizing the grid doesn't appear to have hurt the United Kingdom any. Quite the contrary. When it comes to electricity, at least, Britannia still rules to some extent.
Industrial prices in the United Kingdom continue to be among the most competitive in the world, according to an Electricity Association (EA) survey. Industrial contract prices are now 49 percent cheaper than in Japan, and 41 percent less than in Germany. Average prices in Italy, Spain, and the United States are also more expensive.
The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) has approved its first market-indexed incentive mechanism to encourage a local distribution company (LDC) to control gas-supply costs. Brooklyn Union Gas Co.'s modified proposal for a one-year pilot incentive mechanism employs an external index as a gas-cost target (the monthly closing natural gas contract price on the New York Mercantile Exchange), rather than a series of internal cost measures based on estimated fixed and variable costs.
Having committed to employing competition in the telecommunications local exchange carrier (LEC) market to elicit the broadest range of service offerings while ensuring fair rates, state commissions are now establishing regulations to put the new policies into effect. Current investigations focus on the proper costing and rate-setting methods for interconnection and transport services among newly competing carriers.