The Innovator's Dilemma
Assessing the risks and rewards of distributed energy strategies.
To embrace change or fight it? The choice to either act or wait and see is fraught with complexity.
Capital structure
A Trip to RIIO in Your Future?
Great Britain’s latest innovation in grid regulation.
Great Britain’s electric regulator takes performance-based regulation to a new, more complex level, weighing policy choices against attendant costs.
Zone of Reasonableness
Coping with rising profitability, a decade after restructuring.
With a recent flurry of gas pipeline rate investigations at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), many pipeline owners face the prospect of having their profits scrutinized to ensure their rates are just and reasonable. Understanding FERC’s approach will help companies ensure they’re not falling outside the zone of reasonableness.
Return on Equity: Gen Sector Issues
Ratemaking Special: A survey of recent retail rate cases for electric and gas utilities.
(November 2005) The results of annual survey of rates of return on equity authorized for major electric and natural-gas utilities—based on a sample of the retail rate cases conducted by state public utility commissions—show a vibrant and perhaps growing interest in traditional rate-of-return regulation.
Turning Capital to Wealth: A Ranking of U. S. Utilities
An alternative measure of performance - not based on dividends, earnings growth or P/E ratios.
How to place a value on a utility company? That is the question.
The traditional models no longer work very well. Dividend discount models will not work well if utilities cut dividends and buy back stock to return capital to the shareholders. Earnings growth offers no reliable performance gauge either, as utilities acquire or divest large amounts of capital. Restructuring charges often become necessary to shift resources to their best use.