Need for New Regulatory/Business Models

How to Help Them Understand the New Competitive Marketplace

Understand the mindset of legislators and regulators: constituent satisfaction is key for both. State legislators are the folks who can change the regulatory model.
Byline: 

Tom Sloan

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Nice Work If You Can Get It

Rate of Return for Fun and Profit

If you want actionable intelligence up front, here it is: invest in regulated utilities. There is mounting evidence that investment in utility stocks has outperformed the broader market in the past, and will continue to do so.
Byline: 

Steve Huntoon

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Marginal Utility

Changing the Electric Utility Financial Paradigm

Global capital markets have accommodated the industry with low interest rates and high stock price multiples, but capital markets are fickle. Electrics will be capitalized more like other industrial companies, and less like regulated monopolies.
Byline: 

Leonard S. Hyman and William I. Tilles

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Pay-As-Bid Revisited

Many see a higher cap as a windfall for nuclear and coal.

FERC’s new rulemaking proposal would allow generators to tender supply bids higher than $1,000 per megawatt-hour, if it really costs that much to buy fuel to generate power. Some opponents say that may be OK for gas-fired turbines, but it’s not needed for nuclear or coal-fired plants.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Topping the $1k Cap

Still Beyond the Pale?

Two decades into our grand experiment with wholesale power markets and we’re still debating the need for a cap on prices.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Estimating Benefits of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Social Cost of Carbon

In Paris at the end of 2015, the world’s governments decided to be more ambitious than ever on climate change. They set their sights on a goal of limiting the increase in average global temperature to well below two degrees Celsius. Countries committed to constrain their greenhouse gas emissions over the next 10 to 15 years.
Byline: 

Steven Rose

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The Mobiles are FAST

Including mobile substations in Strategic Transformer Reserve Program

Both spare large power transformers, and emergency mobile substations, have critical roles in the U.S. Department of Energy's Strategic Transformer Reserve Program, STRP. An emergency mobile substation can literally roll onto the site on the bed of a truck, run connecting wires to the power lines, and bypass all of the damaged substation equipment, allowing electricity to flow again within hours.
Byline: 

Joseph Donovan

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The Middle Way

A Narrative Addressing the Greatest Challenge of Our Time

The electricity sector is currently stuck in a false zero sum mentality between providers, technology companies, and policymakers. In this first article of a series, we explore an alternative narrative based on three core operating principles.
Byline: 

Matt Futch and Josh Freed

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Good Ratemaking is Hard to Do

Especially in today’s politically charged environment

Trying to use ratemaking to address an increasing number of social issues intensifies the difficulty for regulators to reach a balanced outcome. Net metering stands out as economically inefficient, unfair and a regressive cross-subsidy, essentially an implicit tax on non-solar customers.
Byline: 

Kenneth W. Costello

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Preparing for the Inevitable

New Approach to Recovery from Catastrophic Losses of Grid Facilities

How to adequately prepare for recovery from catastrophic losses: Doing nothing may minimize cost in the short run, but it leaves electricity customers exposed to the risk of extended outages. At the other extreme, having each utility purchase its own dedicated inventory of critical equipment would be duplicative and prohibitively expensive for utility customers. A shared inventory model offers a sensible middle-ground approach.
Byline: 

Paul Afonso, Lauren Azar, Dian Grueneich and James Hoecker

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