Long Island Lighting Co.

LILCO to Promote Customer Choice

The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) will permit Long Island Lighting Co. (LILCO), a natural gas local distribution company (LDC), to institute temporarily a series of tariff revisions designed to enhance customers' ability to choose competing suppliers of natural gas.

According to PSC staff, the LDC's plan to offer a new array of firm transportation choices constitutes a "reasonable alternative" to full disaggregation of existing sales rates.

Phantom Taxes: The Big Paycheck

The restructuring debate in the electric industry has focused on nuclear assets at risk for "stranding" under deregulation, while another issue has largely eluded public scrutiny: accumulated deferred federal income taxes (ADFITs). ADFITs represent money that utilities have received from ratepayers to cover federal tax expenses not yet actually recognized and paid.

Study Calls Muni Trend "Traditional"

Coopers & Lybrand has released its 1996 Electric Municipalization Review, which examines the two municipalizations completed since the Energy Policy Act of 1992: Broken Bow, OK, and Bozrah, CT.

Broken Bow, which began operating in 1995, serves the new six-megawatt (Mw) load of one industrial customer and owns no electric facilities; Public Service Co. of Oklahoma serves town residents. The Town of Bozrah had been served by a privately held corporation, Bozrah Light & Power (BL&P), whose owner was retiring and wanted to sell.

A Champion for Public Power

Soft-spoken, but no featherweight,

APPA Director Alan Richardson will fight

toe-to-toe with well-heeled

adversaries. If he were a boxer, his name might be Alan "The Right" Richardson.

The executive director of the American Public Power Association (APPA) always toes the canvas, swinging for equity for his 1,750 members, shadowing its "heavyweight" adversaries, investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs).

LILCO Opens Gas to Competition

The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) has approved a plan, "NaturalChoice," allowing customers of Long Island Lighting Co. (LILCO) to purchase natural gas from a qualified supplier of their choice. LILCO is the first company in New York, and one of the first in the nation, to open its gas system to competition.

LILCO's commercial, industrial, and residential gas customers may now choose to purchase gas directly from brokers or to continue purchasing from LILCO.

Retail Aggregation: A Guaranteed Right for Small Customers?

With a CTC likely to cover stranded costs,

aggregators must somehow find power cheap

enough to offer real savings.

Retail aggregation: Wherever you stand, it appears 1998 could be the year of reckoning.

By then (em say those watching the future of aggregation in the "leader" states of California, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire (em rulemakings will have sorted out the issues of stranded costs, distribution, and reliability.

Top 14 R&D Players Named in Report

TECC Group, Inc. has identified 14 U.S. investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs) as major players in research and development (R&D), with expenditures in excess of $10 million. TECC's report, U.S. Electric IOU Research, Development & Demonstration Expense Comparisons 1994, places Southern California Edison at the top of the list ($64 million) and PECO Energy Co. 14th ($11 million). In between, in descending order, we find: Consolidated Edison Co.

Moody's Finds Northeastern Utilities Under Pressure

A new report by Moody's Investors Service, Northeast Break-Even Analysis, finds that wide variations in the cost structures of investor-owned, municipal, and state electric utilities in the Northeastern United States will disadvantage the majority under deregulation in relation to their peers in contiguous regions. If full competition is introduced, Moody's concludes that the credit quality of Northeastern utilities with above-average costs would likely deteriorate because some investments are unrecoverable from ratepayers.