Revisiting Bonbright’s Principles of Public Utility Rates in a DER World
This article originally appeared in The Electricity Journal, Volume 1, Issue 8, pp. 9-13 (October 2018), available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619018302276. Reprinted with permission from The Electricity Journal and Elsevier under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License. Full license terms: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode. Abstract: Professor James Bonbright’s Principles of Public Utility Rates, first published in 1961, was built around a model of vertically integrated electricity monopolies and approached ratemaking largely as an exercise in balancing the interests of capital attraction with those of ratepayers, all within a ‘public interest’ framework. This article seeds a new conversation about changes to the venerable Bonbright principles and introduces new principles of public utility rates for an era of electric utility transformation.