Related Research Articles
A public utility company is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service. Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and regulation ranging from local community-based groups to statewide government monopolies.
Southern Company is an American gas and electric utility holding company based in the Southern United States. It is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with executive offices also located in Birmingham, Alabama. The company is the second largest utility company in the U.S. in terms of customer base, as of 2021. Through its subsidiaries it serves 9 million gas and electric utility customers in 6 states. Southern Company's regulated regional electric utilities serve a 120,000-square-mile (310,000 km2) territory with 27,000 miles (43,000 km) of distribution lines.
In accountancy, depreciation is a term that refers to two aspects of the same concept: first, an actual reduction in the fair value of an asset, such as the decrease in value of factory equipment each year as it is used and wears, and second, the allocation in accounting statements of the original cost of the assets to periods in which the assets are used.
A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.
Net metering is an electricity billing mechanism that allows consumers who generate some or all of their own electricity to use that electricity anytime, instead of when it is generated. This is particularly important with renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which are non-dispatchable. Monthly net metering allows consumers to use solar power generated during the day at night, or wind from a windy day later in the month. Annual net metering rolls over a net kilowatt-hour (kWh) credit to the following month, allowing solar power that was generated in July to be used in December, or wind power from March in August.
Municipalization is the transfer of private entities, assets, service providers, or corporations to public ownership by a municipality, including a city, county, or public utility district ownership. The transfer may be from private ownership or from other levels of government. It is the opposite of privatization and is different from nationalization. The term municipalization largely refers to the transfer of ownership of utilities from Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) to public ownership, and operation, by local government whether that be at the city, county or state level. While this is most often applied to electricity it can also refer to solar energy, water, sewer, trash, natural gas or other services.
The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act is a United States Act passed as part of the National Energy Act. It was meant to promote energy conservation and promote greater use of domestic energy and renewable energy. The law was created in response to the 1973 energy crisis, and one year in advance of a second energy crisis.
The California Public Utilities Commission is a regulatory agency that regulates privately owned public utilities in the state of California, including electric power, telecommunications, natural gas and water companies. In addition, the CPUC regulates common carriers, including household goods movers, limousines, rideshare services, self-driving cars, and rail crossing safety. The CPUC has headquarters in the Civic Center district of San Francisco, and field offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento.
SCANA Corporation was an American regulated electric and natural gas public utility. The company was based in Cayce, South Carolina, a suburb of Columbia, South Carolina. Following the Nukegate scandal, the company's stock fell and the company was in disrepair. In January 2019, SCANA was acquired by Dominion Energy. The corporate name SCANA was not an acronym, but was taken from the letters in South Carolina.
Rate-of-return regulation is a system for setting the prices charged by government-regulated monopolies, such as public utilities. It attempts to set prices at efficient levels equal to the efficient costs of production, plus a government-permitted rate of return on capital.
Nuclear power construction costs have varied significantly across the world and in time. Large and rapid increases in cost occurred during the 1970s, especially in the United States. Recent cost trends in countries such as Japan and Korea have been very different, including periods of stability and decline in costs.
A power purchase agreement (PPA), or electricity power agreement, is a long-term contract between an electricity generator and a customer, usually a utility, government or company. PPAs may last anywhere between 5 and 20 years, during which time the power purchaser buys energy at a pre-negotiated price. Such agreements play a key role in the financing of independently owned electricity generators, especially producers of renewable energy like solar farms or wind farms.
PECO, formerly the Philadelphia Electric Company, is an energy company founded in 1881 and incorporated in 1929. It became part of Exelon Corporation in 2000 when it merged with Commonwealth Edison's holding company Unicom Corp.
Different methods of electricity generation can incur a variety of different costs, which can be divided into three general categories: 1) wholesale costs, or all costs paid by utilities associated with acquiring and distributing electricity to consumers, 2) retail costs paid by consumers, and 3) external costs, or externalities, imposed on society.
An electric utility, or a power company, is a company in the electric power industry that engages in electricity generation and distribution of electricity for sale generally in a regulated market. The electrical utility industry is a major provider of energy in most countries.
In public utility regulation, decoupling refers to the disassociation of a utility's profits from its sales of the energy commodity. Instead, a rate of return is aligned with meeting revenue targets, and rates are adjusted up or down to meet the target at the end of the adjustment period. This makes the utility indifferent to selling less product and improves the ability of energy efficiency and distributed generation to operate within the utility environment.
Utility ratemaking is the formal regulatory process in the United States by which public utilities set the prices they will charge consumers. Ratemaking, typically carried out through "rate cases" before a public utilities commission, serves as one of the primary instruments of government regulation of public utilities.
Rate base is the value of property on which a public utility is permitted to earn a specified rate of return, in accordance with rules set by a regulatory agency. In general, the rate base consists of the value of property as used by the utility in providing service. It may be calculated by any one or a combination of accounting methods, such as fair value, prudent investment, reproduction cost, or original cost.
In the utilities industry, the Prudent Investment Rule refers to a series of state standards which determine the fiscal soundness of a utility in the course of rate recovery for recoverable capital costs to be determined by that state’s Public Service Commission (PSC). The determination is established through a series of filings from the utility to the PSC and hearings conducted by the PSC. This occurs during a prudency hearing. The PSC follows these standards to determine if the capital costs were a "prudent investment". To determine the prudency of the investment, the PSC applies the prudent investment test or standard, determining if the costs were reasonable at the time they were incurred, and given the circumstances and what was known or knowable at the time, are to be included in the firm's rates. It is commonly used as an oversight tool by the government to ensure that money invested into a project is being spent as it was intended so the utility may recoup some costs in construction through a recovery in rates, hence the title prudent investment rule. Regulators can consider cases of hidden imprudence, but are required to consider what was known or knowable at the time the decision was made by the PSC.
The Nukegate scandal was a political and legal scandal that arose from the abandonment of the Virgil C. Summer nuclear expansion project in South Carolina by South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) and the South Carolina Public Service Authority in 2017. It was the largest business failure in the history of South Carolina. Before its termination, the expansion was considered the harbinger of a national nuclear renaissance. Under joint ownership, the two utilities collectively invested $9 billion into the construction of two nuclear reactors in Fairfield County, South Carolina from 2008 until 2017. The utilities were able to fund the project by shifting the risk onto their customers using a state law that allowed utilities to raise consumers' electricity rates to pay for nuclear construction.
References
- 1 2 Baldwin, Vicki; Robert Malko. "Utah State Bar" . Retrieved 14 July 2016.
- ↑ Rose, Kenneth (2004). "Electric Power: Traditional Monopoly Franchise Regulation and Rate Making". Encyclopedia of Energy. Oxford: Elsevier Science & Technology.
- ↑ Rose, Kenneth (2004). "Electric Power: Traditional Monopoly Franchise Regulation and Rate Making". Encyclopedia of Energy. Oxford: Elsevier Science & Technology.
- ↑ "FEDERAL POWER COMMISSION ET AL. V. HOPE NATURAL GAS CO. CITY OF CLEVELAND V. SAME". Cornell University Law School. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
- ↑ Hoecker, James J. ""USED AND USEFUL": AUTOPSY OF A RATEMAKING POLICY" (PDF). Energy Law Journal. 8:303. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
- ↑ Murray, Raymond LeRoy (2001). Nuclear Energy: An Introduction to the Concepts, Systems, and Applications of Nuclear Processes. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
- ↑ "Federal Energy Regulatory Commission" (PDF). GPO. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
- ↑ Dakins, Melvin G. "The Changing Nature of Public Utility Regulation: The Used and Useful Property Rate Base Versus the Capitalization Rate Base in the Nuclear Age". Louisiana Law Review. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
- ↑ Richard J. Gilbert, ed. (2001). Regulatory Choices: A Perspective on Developments in Energy Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press.