Suchergebnisse

This book reflects the challenges in utility industries and provides solutions from a managerial perspective. It features insights from managers, researchers, professionals in utility-related banking, consulting, and public and supranational organizations.

An alphabet soup of government agencies like FERC, EPA, EIA, PHMSA, MSHA and the ISOs and RTOs collect and publish terabytes of data about the US energy system. It includes operating costs and fuel consumption, hourly power output and GHG emissions, and the age and length of natural gas pipelines, the price of electricity every 5 minutes at thousands of nodes in the grid, coal production numbers and much much more. In theory all this data is public and freely available, but in practice it takes a lot of wrangling to make it usable for analysis. The result: it's packaged up by one or two platform monopolies that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for easy access, excluding most non-corporate users. But for anyone interested in the ongoing transformation of our energy system and its climate impacts, this data is a treasure trove worth excavating. Catalyst Cooperative's Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) Project has been working for the last 2.5 years to liberate this data and make it freely accessible to activists, data journalists, and researchers working on US climate and energy policy. This talk takes a look at what the data is, where it comes from, why it's interesting, how we're processing it and making it available, and some of the challenges we're facing and opportunities we see ahead.

A typology of issues, based on a theory of public advocacy in regulatory proceedings, is used to explain differences in utility regulatory policies. The theory focuses on grass-roots advocates (citizen groups) & proxy advocates (state officials such as the attorney general or a consumer counsel); the issues involve different levels of technical complexity & consumer conflict. It is hypothesized that grass-roots advocates will be effective when issues are low in technical complexity & proxy advocates effective when issues are low in consumer conflict. Aggregate data from 51 public utility commissions confirm these expectations, through multiple regression analysis & profit analysis in four issue areas. Case studies are derived from interviews with 284 public advocates, utility company executives, & public utility regulators in 12 states. Within the same regulatory policy domain, issues differ in complexity & conflict, with important policy consequences. 3 Tables. Modified HA.