Valuing Grid Intelligence
Breaking Down Utility Silos
“Efficiency and customer experience benefits are hard to quantify, and regulators are increasingly wary of qualitative arguments as affordability becomes a dominant concern.”
Power, Water, and Change: AI's Impacts on Energy and Environmental Strategy
Balch & Bingham
“Until a solution is determined and implemented, dramatically increasing demand leads to dramatically increasing wholesale prices for capacity, energy, and transmission, which is generally passed through to retail customers.”
Utility Scale Energy Storage
Underutilized and Overlooked
“How much remaining stored energy is available at any moment – known as State of Charge (SoC) – is not transparent to grid operators and planners. Achieving greater visibility into SoC is an overlooked means to unlock greater capacity and reliability for the grid at lower cost.”
Proposed FCC Policy Change Threatens Utility Services, Affordability
Regulators Should Weigh In
“If the FCC were to grant NextNav preemptive rights to the 900 MHz spectrum, the resulting need to revert to manual meter reading, coupled with subsequent deployment of replacement solutions, could increase costs for ratepayers by an estimated $100 billion.”
Line Extension Policies: Regulatory Compact and Economics of Affordable Utility Rates
AGA
“By severing the traditional safeguards for reasonable system growth, these policies create inappropriate cross subsidies and erode one of the core mechanisms through which utility rates have historically been kept affordable.”
Transformational Western Leader Says Farewell
WECC
“At WECC, we don’t take an opinion on the best technology or resource to use for generating electricity or any economic or environmental aspect. Our focus is to make sure the West has electricity at all hours of the day and night now and into the future, and that the grid remains stable.”
State Utility Regulation: Chair Kayla Hahn
Missouri PSC
“Our tariffs are designed to allow certain carbon-free or renewable programs to be funded to serve large load customers but designed to ensure that residential or commercial customers are held harmless in terms of the costs of those programs.”
State Utility Regulation: Chair Rory Christian
New York PSC
“We’re going to be tying executive pay to affordability. We’re going to require utilities to publicly disclose how CEO salaries compare to their average workers’ pay, and report on an affordability index that will measure energy burden in their service territories.”
What's Ahead With Commission Chairs
Regulators
Public Utilities Fortnightly has been publishing a popular series of conversations with Commission Chairs, which started in 2025. This is continuing throughout 2026 and providing insights into the latest developments in state regulation in the public interest.
The discussions also provide an understanding of which issues are similar and which are different among the states. Affordability is front and center, as is load growth from data centers and artificial intelligence, but state legislation, policy, and goals affect all the issues.
Three Ways AI Can Help Deliver More Power at Lower Costs
AI for Affordability
“Increasingly, utilities and grid operators are deploying new AI- and ML-powered tools to improve their decision making and capture efficiencies that can reduce overall system costs.”