Despite recent announcements by the Environmental Protection Agency to place additional restraints on power plant emissions, coal continues to dominate electric fuels markets. Though some fear new EPA standards could pressure marginal coal plants to close, it is unlikely this will happen. Coal markets are propped up by a marked decrease in contract prices, cleaner mining, productivity gains, troubled nuclear power and instability in gas and oil prices.

Key points from approved and pending legislation

California:

A.B. 1890, signed into law Sept. 23, 1996.

• Plant Divestiture. To ensure the safe, reliable operation when utilities sell off generating facilities, buyers or successor corporations must keep the current staff on board for at least two years.

• Stranded Cost Recovery. Statute recognizes explicitly that transition to customer choice can produce employee hardships.

In aiming to make financial statements more meaningful, will FASB instead make them indecipherable?

By mid-summer, a total of 123 companies had cranked out some 574 pages of comments, detailing exactly what they thought of the accounting rules proposed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board to cover the closure or removal of certain long-lived assets. %n1%n The FASB's"Exposure Draft," issued early last year, had requested comments on eight issues. The respondents answered as requested, but also raised a host of new questions.

"Spark spread" sets value, but as prices diverge from system

lambda, merchant plant buyers will be flying blind.

Many power plants will be bought and sold in the next decade. Some utilities will divest power plants as required by regulators; others will sell for strategic reasons. Most of the plants sold likely will become merchant plants, with no guaranteed market for their electric output. Merchant plant activity is already significant and growing. The value of these plants will depend on how well they can perform in an uncertain market.

In Norway and in England and Wales, power retailers are learning hard lessons.

The U.S. electric industry has long tried to follow Thomas Edison's dictum "to sell light instead of current" (em to get beyond the meter. But what is beyond the meter at industrial and commercial sites?

In energy-intensive industries one sees processes such as smelters, pulp mills, rolling mills, refineries and chemical plants. In general manufacturing, although some electricity is used for specialized electrotechnologies, most is used for lighting, motive power, computing and robotics.

In union circles, they call it "burial insurance." That apt phrase denotes the severance, early retirement and re-training packages negotiated for veteran utility workers sideswiped by a changing market.

So far, labor has won some insurance: through legislation in California and in Maine; through a commission order in Massachusetts; and a pending settlement agreement in New York City, prompted by a commission order.

Labor lost hard in Pennsylvania and in Rhode Island, however. Worker protections weren't built into restructuring decisions in those states.

Consumers want the credit option, study says.

More than 5 percent of all recurring bills - like phone, magazine and insurance bills - are paid with a credit card (see Chart 1), according to a study conducted by Market Facts Inc. for Visa U.S.A. Yet less than one-half of 1 percent of consumers pull out their plastic to pay utility bills (see Chart 3).

Here's one likely reason: Only 8 percent of all utilities accept credit card payments (see Chart 2). Utilities may want to reconsider their offerings, however.

The Alabama Public Service Commission has formally requested that state law enforcement officials prosecute a reseller of telecommunications services for ongoing incidents of "deceptive and misleading" marketing activities.

The so-called "slamming" practices include switching customers without documenting their consent. Earlier in the year, the commission had found that Long Distance Services Inc. had engaged in a series of improper practices, including the use of sweepstake boxes, to sign up new customers to its service without proper consent.

The New York Public Service Commission has directed Consolidated Edison Co. to modify its gas transportation rates to more accurately reflect costs.

The commission said that the tariff revisions mark a "major step" for a service territory where competition between the utility and gas marketers had not yet developed.

Regulators in Pennsylvania and New Jersey have taken steps to address relationships between natural gas utilities, customers, marketers and brokers operating in their respective states, announcing policies to cover such topics as fitness requirements, marketing practices and consumer protection.

One question that continues to raise concern is price arbitrage by marketers during supply emergencies that might affect service to captive residential customers.

Pennsylvania.