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Law & Lawyers

The Modern Utility: Still a Black Box?

Wall Street bankers say utilities are not effectively telling their story.

How do you value an investor-owned utility? Ever since the Enron debacle, the credit crisis and the economic downturn, many in the investment community say that there exists a need for utilities to better communicate their business vision and corporate model — particularly now that the economy is headed into an economic upswing and utilities will have to compete with higher-yielding financial instruments such as U.S. treasuries, or competing equities with higher-paying dividends.
Byline: 

Richard Stavros

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A Financial Postmortem: Ten Years of Electricity Restructuring

A decade of restructuring has not affected the financial integrity of the average regulated utility.

Ideological bias, economic principles, success of previous deregulation, inordinate greed, and political expediency fueled the movement for electricity deregulation. The authorities, however, never deregulated. They chose to restructure.
Byline: 

Leonard S. Hyman

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Life After CRM

For most energy firms, the returns on investments in customer relationship management have been profoundly disappointing.

From the start, CRM has been an imprecise term that loosely describes a multitude of various capabilities, including sales management, marketing analysis, campaign management, customer contact management, and customer self-service applications. CRM solutions do not necessarily replace CIS systems.
Byline: 

Guerry Waters

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Energy Trading: What's Your Position?

Obtaining a position measurement in energy markets has become more complex and has increased financial risks for integrated utilities.

"What's your position?" The answer to that simple question in today's energy markets is anything but simple. In fact, answering this question may be the single most difficult challenge faced by a fully integrated energy firm in its efforts to manage risk.
Byline: 

Peter Armstrong

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Close to Load, Far From Consensus

Feds seek plug-and-play for distributed generation, but utilities want the power to stay local.

Pity the poor Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. With its market crusade out of favor, and transmission reform suddenly suspect after the Aug. 14 blackout, it could use a new agenda. Indeed, FERC this past July had proposed a new set of standards for the connection of small- and micro-sized power plants units to regional transmission networks, or even to radial or local distribution lines operating at low voltages.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Time After Time

Regulators are starting to show signs of strain over the restructuring debate.

Up to now, many in the industry thought everybody but the regulators had tired of the constant back-and-forth over regional market issues such as standard market design. This is not to say that state regulators have been able to find any common resolution.
Byline: 

Richard Stavros

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People

People for November 15, 2003

New opportunities at Duke Energy, the Department of Energy, Progress Energy, and others.
Byline: 

PUF

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Return on Equity: A Survey of recent PUC Rulings

A Survey of Recent PUC Rulings

Our annual overview of PUC rulings shows how rate orders handed down during the past 12 months have focused both on declining interest rates and increased financial risks—and how they should affect investor expectations.
Byline: 

Phillip S. Cross

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New Nuclear Construction: Still on Hold

A number of factors point to expanded nuclear generation. But when?

Skeptics believe investors will continue to shy away from nuclear in the coming decades, but conditions are changing, with several factors pointing to expanded nuclear generation.
Byline: 

Neil J. Numark and Micheal O. Terry

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