Knowledge Center
We believe that sharing our expertise and collaborations in clean energy policy is how real, effective change happens.
From reports and policy briefs, to webinars and podcasts—RAP advisors have built an extensive collection of resources providing in-depth analysis and practical solutions to today’s energy challenges.
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In this report, produced with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Synapse Energy Economics, RAP and Community Action Partnership take an in-depth look at the disparate impacts electric and natural gas infrastructure have on economic, social, and health… View Summary +
A decarbonized energy sector’s many benefits include lower prices, grid resiliency and cleaner energy. However, in order to attain this goal, regulators will need to actively engage in regulatory reforms that align utilities’ actions with the public good. Tools that… View Summary +
This report, the first of three volumes of Next-Generation Performance-Based Regulation: Emphasizing Utility Performance to Unleash Power Sector Innovation, examines the concept of performance-based regulation (PBR) and how it can provide a framework to connect goals, targets, and measures to… View Summary +
This report, the second of three volumes of Next-Generation Performance-Based Regulation: Emphasizing Utility Performance to Unleash Power Sector Innovation, focuses on best practices for design, development, and implementation of performance-based regulation mechanisms. It begins by laying the groundwork for understanding… View Summary +
This report, the final of three volumes of Next-Generation Performance-Based Regulation: Emphasizing Utility Performance to Unleash Power Sector Innovation, focuses on how performance-based regulation (PBR) can be used to navigate an era of rapid technological change in the power sector. View Summary +
This paper was written to assist the Public Service Commission of Arkansas as it seeks to remove barriers to entry for aggregators of distributed energy resources (DERs), encourage customer participation—the key to the success of DERs —and incentivize utility cooperation… View Summary +
Traditional “cost-of-service” regulation, where the rate of return is set on rate base, gives utilities incentives to invest in additional infrastructure to increase their own revenues, even when less expensive options are available to meet customers’ needs. The adoption of… View Summary +
Performance-based regulation (PBR) enables regulators to reform 100-year-old regulatory structures to unleash innovations within 21st century power systems. Our current electric system is built upon an old regulatory paradigm that ensured safe and reliable electricity at reasonable prices from capital-intensive… View Summary +
In this webinar, RAP explores the merits of decoupling and describes how states can tailor decoupling mechanisms to work best for them. Drawing from the report Decoupling Design: Customizing Revenue Regulation to Your State’s Priorities, Janine Migden-Ostrander and Richard… View Summary +
Ensuring a stronger grid that is capable of withstanding a catastrophic event, or alternatively a grid for which outage durations can be minimized in such an event, involves several steps. First is prevention: identifying the grid’s weaknesses and how to… View Summary +
Under traditional regulation, utilities make more money when they sell more energy. Yet this reality is at odds with explicit public policy objectives that utility and environmental regulators are charged with achieving, including economic efficiency and environmental protection. Many utility-sector… View Summary +
Many states have adopted utility decoupling, or revenue regulation, which breaks the link between electricity sales and revenues to the utility. Originally, it was conceived as a way to make utilities indifferent to annual sales volumes by addressing the net… View Summary +
Ever since the introduction of retail competition in the late 1990s, the traditional regulatory paradigm that guided the last century has been evolving to adapt to the emergence of new energy technologies and the consumers’ appetite to have more control… View Summary +
Utilities face unprecedented changes in the way power is generated and delivered. With the ramp-up in distributed generation, energy efficiency and demand response, electric vehicles, smart appliances, and more, the industry must rethink its rate structures to accommodate and encourage… View Summary +
Building on the first webinar of the series “Fundamentals of Rate Design,” Jim Lazar and Janine Migden-Ostrander introduced the finer points of cost allocation and dynamic pricing, as well as net metering and alternatives. Because cost allocation is an inexact… View Summary +