January’s Public Utilities Fortnightly includes 27 pages on our visit to the Maine PUC, including this excerpt by Chair Mark Vannoy:
“I remember one of my first meetings of the New England Power Pool talking to some of the folks that had been there for a long time. They were asking me, how’s it going? As the new commissioner and the engineer, who was used to building things, I had gotten through my first two days of this meeting. I said to them, well, I’m struggling because we just keep talking about the problem. We’re not defining it and moving to the solution space. When are we going to move to the solution space? That’s been a learning curve for me.
“The engineer in me wants to identify the problem, reach agreement on a good definition of the problem, and then move forward. You get a good definition, move into the design space, come up with the solution, build it, and move on. We struggle in a lot of our policy discussions identifying what the problem is that we’re trying to solve.”