Regulation

Boardroom Showdown

Investors are revolting against poor corporate governance, demanding tighter controls that will boost earnings and stock price.

Does good governance lead to superior financial performance? Some large institutional shareholders think so, and they’re pushing for changes. Will your company be affected?

FERC's GulfTerra Orders: Changes in the Pipeline

A new FERC decision veers away from congressional intent not to burden intrastate pipelines with interstate policies.

Two recent orders in a GulfTerra Texas Pipeline LP rate case make new precedent for Natural Gas Policy Act intrastate pipelines providing interstate transportation.

The Generation Glut: When Will It End?

An analysis of the timing, location, and mix of new capacity additions that may be needed in the future.

An analysis of the timing, location, and mix of new capacity additions that may be needed in the future.

The Road Not Taken

Revisiting performance-based rates with endogenous market designs.

Have regulators selected the wrong market design in their restructurings during the past two decades?

Europe Rewired: A Giant Awakens

EU nations are taking slow steps toward an integrated energy market, but they are many paces ahead of U.S. efforts.

The emerging EU energy market faces barriers to competition and regional integration, exacerbated by the exodus of American companies from the market and the heightened trend toward oligopoly control. Nevertheless, European integration is moving at a faster pace than American initiatives.

Rethinking Restructuring

Two Cato analysts suggest a return to the past-vertical integration, but now with no state regulators.

The defeat of the energy bill in the Senate last year has thrown electricity restructuring back on its heels. There clearly is no consensus among politicians or academics regarding how this industry ought to be organized or how it might best be regulated. Finding our way out of this morass requires a reconsideration of how we got to this dismal point in our regulatory journey. Doing so suggests a surprising series of conclusions about what has gone wrong and where to go from here.

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.

21st Century ROEs: What Is Reasonable?

How to benchmark return on equity (ROE) and depreciation expense in utility rate cases.

How to benchmark return on equity (ROE) and depreciation expense in utility rate cases.

 

Perspective

Proper authority and market monitoring and mitigation could make the system work.

Perspective

Proper authority and market monitoring and mitigation could make the system work.

 

In the last few years we have watched appalled as the western U.S. electricity markets collapsed, taking with them the solvency and viability of several very large participants, including the California Power Exchange (PX).