Northeast Utilities Company adopted an ambitious new competitive strategy in the mid-1980s, seeking to become the low-cost supplier in New England electric power markets bracing for deregulation. Given its high-cost nuclear facilities, doing so required a corporate turnaround. For a decade...

Unbundling the attributes of electricity service is increasingly being recognized as a promising approach for dealing with capacity shortages, cost recovery and specific customer needs. Chao and Wilson (1986) elucidate this approach using the example of priority service options, which allow for...

Energy analysts are often faced with the need to determine the value of electric service reliability in the absence of an explicit market for this service feature. One method for indirectly measuring consumers' valuation is called "contingent valuation" (CV). In service reliability applications,...

As of April 1997, more than forty municipalization proposals have emerged in seventeen states as a means of evading competition transition charges for stranded costs proposed by state commissions. Stranded costs equal the difference between expected regulated net-revenues and the netrevenues...

The average electricity rates that are charged by investor-owned utilities are affected by external factors that cannot be regulated by direct management. Results of a multiple regression analysis of three California utilities in relation to 96 utility companies indicate that the variations in...

New well drilling technologies, when utilized to fracture common shale formations promise to provide access to very large volumes of gas. Indeed, the trade press and news media have generally taken the position that “fracgas” over the next decade can add up to 800 trillion cubic feet of...

New well drilling technologies, when utilized to fracture common shale formations promise to provide access to very large volumes of gas. Indeed, the trade press and news media have generally taken the position that “fracgas” over the next decade can add up to 800 trillion cubic feet of...