The European Directive on common rules for the internal market in electricity (2009/72/EC) requires all member states to 'ensure the implementation of intelligent metering systems' in order to foster a more active involvement of customers in the electricity market. Such intelligent metering...

The U.S. Department of Energy is working to develop and implement commercial-scale carbon capture and storage. This article discusses the technical and legal problems that must be resolved to have a viable program. It concludes that whether carbon sequestration becomes a commercial reality will...

This Article evaluates the regulatory treatment of windfall proceeds from a utility's purchase and subsequent sale of important assets. For service to be sustained, regulatory treatment of proceeds from all jurisdictional activities is such that expected returns to equity investment will equal...

Many in the energy sector are calling for a transformation of the traditional utility model. However, proposals for “Utility 2.0” typically maintain the bilateral, adversarial relationship between the utility and its regulator. This article posits that one of the key flaws in the U.S....

While the link between the ownership and productive efficiency of firms has been discussed extensively, no consensus exists regarding the superiority of one or the other in non-competitive, regulated environments. This paper applies a flexible production model to test for efficiency differences...

I show that British electricity tariffs create substantial welfare loss, equivalent to between six and eighteen percent of domestic consumption value. Losses are greater than unpriced distributional and environmental counter effects. Expected technological change will increase this welfare loss....

Many OECD countries such as the USA, the UK or Switzerland are concerned with the affordability of utility services and the distributional consequences inherent in the pricing strategy of basic goods and services, such as electricity. However, the effectiveness of the electricity tariff as a...

Rebates that reward economic agents if they meet a minimum conservation threshold are a popular policy to encourage energy conservation. However, most threshold-based rebates are structured such that they do not encourage reduction beyond the threshold. In this paper, I show theoretically that...

This Paper explores asks a very fundamental question: If meaningful, facilities-based competition and "de-regulation" for telecommunications and information services (and, a fortiori, competition and de-regulation for electricity as well) really is the end-goal of this whole "restructuring"...

We estimate the welfare implications of a cost-reflective 'Coasian' reform of electricity network tariffs using an Irish case study. We find that current Distribution Use of System (DUoS) tariffs deviate considerably from a cost-reflective structure. At the individual level, tariff reform leads...