This all-day continuing legal education program (CLE) will provide its attendees with legal and regulatory education on the ongoing transition to a cleaner energy mix and the related legal elements.
Opinion/Somelofske: To fight climate change, fix public utilities msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Justin Somelofske
As Rhode Island enacts new climate legislation, it is time to confront an unspoken truth: Electric public utility companies in the United States are no longer responsive to the interests of the public they serve.
Most public utilities never were motivated by the public interest as 72 percent of the country receives its electricity service from large, investor-owned utilities that are motivated by maximizing shareholder profit. Yet this truth has been obscured as historically the public interest aligned with the utilities’ interest in the efficient expansion of electric capacity to serve the unsatiated public demand for power.
The alignment resulted in large, centralized generation and distribution facilities and a regulatory compact granting utilities: 1) monopoly power over a region and 2) a just and reasonable return on investments in exchange for providing electricity service to every customer in the region. This regulatory regime worked for nearly a ce