Menu

Blog

Insights from Our Experts
Filter

Getting off gas: Future risks for energy poor households

By Louise Sunderland
If you are in pain, you go to a doctor who prescribes a painkiller. This cheap, proven and readily available treatment relieves your pain and temporarily solves your problem. However, if you continue to take the pills, you risk the considerable downside of long-term reliance without addressing the cause sustainably. For many UK households experiencing energy p... Read More

Striking the Balance in Energy Efficiency Regulation Between Utility Incentives and Customer Costs

By Janine Migden-Ostrander, Martin Kushler
As Americans continue to face rising affordability challenges and struggle to pay their utility bills, consumer advocates are understandably concerned about keeping bills as low as possible. Energy efficiency is the lowest-cost resource and provides customers with the opportunity to reduce how much they spend on electricity. It is a critical resource in the fight... Read More

Early insights from India’s first month operating the real-time market

By Dheer Patel
India’s real-time market (RTM), launched on June 1st, 2020 on both the power exchanges after two years of public consultations by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC). The RTM is a centralized market platform which runs a double-sided closed auction, closer to delivery. The market runs every 30 minutes, i.e., 48 times a day. The timeline below s... Read More

In a Time of Transition, Regulators Can Drive Cutting-Edge Cost Allocation Reform

By Jim Lazar, Mark LeBel
The need for change in how we measure the cost of providing electric service by customer class is obvious to any attentive observer of the dramatic changes now underway in the electric utility industry. Electric Cost Allocation for a New Era, the manual RAP published at the beginning of 2020, provides detailed guidance on the preparation of embedded and marginal ... Read More

低碳电力体系下配电系统运营商面临的挑战

By Philip Baker
向清洁能源的转变正在改变电力系统的性质。电气化程度不断提高，更积极的消费者以及消纳更多风能和太阳能的需求。传统消费者只能被动的消费电，而现代消费者越来越积极，能买卖能源服务、发电、而且调整行为为了支持电网的可靠性、低碳性和经济性。这些趋势正在... Read More

Agricultural demand-side management needs multi-sectoral interventions

By Mahesh Patankar, Frederick Weston, Robert Lieberman
Cheap agricultural electricity has bedevilled the Indian power sector for decades, but enhanced agricultural demand-side management won’t solve the problem alone Virtually everyone with a working knowledge of the Indian power sector will agree that one of the sector’s biggest problems is the very inexpensive (way below average cost) electricity supplied to a... Read More

Pushing water uphill: Putting power behind the renovation wave

By Louise Sunderland
For some time now I have been struck by the irony of the European Commission’s chosen name for its building renovation policy package, the “renovation wave,” given that increasing the rate of renovation has been like pushing water uphill. Currently, we renovate only around 1% of the European building stock each year to reduce energy use. This stubbornly ... Read More

How we reduced our energy bills by 60%

By Jan Rosenow
A year ago, I announced that we had replaced our six-year-old, reliable gas boiler with an air source heat pump. “Ripping out a perfectly well functioning gas boiler before the end of its natural life and replacing it with a heat pump is misguided. It won’t reduce much carbon,” I was told. “Let’s find out,” I thought, and estimated the carbon savi... Read More

Connecting Cities to the PUC Process

By David Farnsworth
As municipal policymakers take increasingly active roles in moving their cities through the energy transition, they need to know their way around their states’ utility regulatory landscape. RAP and our partners at the Building Electrification Initiative (BEI) tackled this topic recently, inviting representatives of both city governments and state utility commis... Read More

Extra Credit: Maximizing the Benefits of Solar in Schools

By Dara Torre, Janine Migden-Ostrander
While across the country America’s schools have been shuttered this spring in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sun continues to shine. More than 1,000 megawatts of installed solar capacity from nearly 5,500 K-12 school buildings continues to generate clean energy and cost savings. With decreased electricity consumption from closures, sizable amounts of so... Read More

The Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP)® is an independent, non-partisan, non-governmental organization dedicated to accelerating the transition to a clean, reliable, and efficient energy future.