RESTRUCTURING ELECTRICITY SUPPLIERS

Emerging public energy policies and regulation options are described, principally for the U.S., but for other countries as well. Problems inherent in some reform ideas, yet to be addressed much less solved by policy-makers, are listed. Attention is directed to practical, real-world matters of economics, politics and public infrastructure policy necessary to be resolved, in the U.S. context alone, before a workable reorganized (electric energy) infrastructure can be realized and accepted. Controversy is sure to rage over 'regulated competition' v. 'deregulation' and 'rivatization' -- simply as ideas and paradigms. The final third of the paper outlines a possible framework for a comprehensive energy, environmental, and economic policy for the United States. Treating the future, it possesses every opportunity to be 'wrong' and simply a guess never to be realized; and, like every idea at one of its early stages, it is sensible, naive, plausible. The thesis, of course, is that lighting, watering, and protecting the earth are group activities too important for controversy and rage to disrupt. Wars in oil-rich nations, domestic political and economic debates, think-tank scientific monographs like those reviewed here, interested-party (gored-ox) press extravaganzas, even Unabomber and 'freemen' activities suggest that disruptions will recur: again and again. The policy challenge is to eschew and ignore the ra

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arge under, well, competition. These distinctions are all treated by Cicchetti and Sepetys (1996, p.3). NEEDS, IF ANY, TO RESTRUCTURE AWAY FROM COST-OF-SERVICE If it is going to be ponderously difficult to switch from cost-of-service regulatory control of utility energy supply, why do it? What was (is) cost-of-service energy management, and why not continue with whatever its paradigms were? Surely they were just as simple (-minded). If there is a compelling reason to leave things as they are, it has to be that setting coal or gas or oil afire, boiling water, or whirling one coil of wire inside another are some simple things that utilities know how to do. If they are going to have to get really technologically innovative and smart about reducing demand, or inventing ways to suck-up and recover CO2, or building a better prime mover to lower their costs and provide competitively lower prices for the same or larger numbers of KWhr, one could predict that screaming at them to do it or setting a deadline for starting may not be sufficient. Competition is supposed to lead to better ideas; everybody says that. And eventually it might. But there is reason to have one more look at the purposes and paradigms of existing, cost-of-
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Approximate Word count = 4863
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)

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