Electrical Energy & Public Utilities

1. What has been variously described as the energy crisis, the energy shortage, and the energy problem came to the forefront of American life in the early 1970s, when the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) quadrupled the price of crude oil and put oil-consuming countries such as the U.S. in a defensive position. The energy program President Jimmy Carter proposed and sent to Congress in 1977, described as "the moral equivalent of war," focused on conservation--decreasing energy use and increasing energy efficiency. Since that time, there has been a good deal of comment and opinion expended by politicians and scholars on where energy-related needs lay.

Issues of electrical-energy availability, generation, cost, and usage have been a persistent feature of discussion, and the issue of the extent and kind of government i

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ve been penalized by excessive and improper regulation, that consumers are paying higher prices as a result, and that competitive market forces should be allowed to operate in electricity T&D just as they have in the telecommunications industry, with a view toward freeing the consumers to make utility choices and freeing the utilities to compete for business on a market basis by offering consumer price incentives. The utilities deplore what they term a philosophy of central government planning, which is associated with inefficiencies because it fails to take adequate account of operational or resource contingencies (State of California passim). Meanwhile, as Cicchetti and Sepetys (48) note, the California PUC has proposed that utilities "include non-price factors in cost-effectiveness analyses of DSM options, as they have been doing for supply-side resources." In other words, the utilities would be forced to consider such intangibles as environmental impact or the energy equivalent of goodwill in placing a value on their energy-conservation resources. This appears to make public utilities excessively vulnerable to environmental and other immeasurable contingencies. "Once again, it looks as if legislators are attempting to use regu
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4421
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)

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