Program Information

• Draft Agenda [MS-Word 104kb]
• Lodging
• Registration [Exit WPUI]

This course is designed to provide experienced rate practitioners with new skills for development of unbundled rates.  The EEI Electric Rate Advanced Course is focused on cutting-edge issues associated with changes in the industry.  In particular, the EEI Economic Regulation and Competition Committee has developed a course curriculum that addresses cost of serve unbundling and the design of unbundled rates for distribution and power supply.

Course Outline

In this year’s Advanced Rate School, in addition to covering the topics below, you will be asked to participate in a team project to outline a regulatory strategy for a hypothetical utility.   You will be assigned to a team, depending on whether you work for a vertically integrated utility, or an unbundled (restructured) utility. Your team will be tasked to develop a regulatory strategy that responds to a set of issues and strategic drivers.  Your team will be asked to deliver a presentation to your hypothetical utility management. 

• Pre-course workshop: Overview of a cost of service study
• Apportioning costs to G, T, and D (including marginal cost analyses)
• Rate mechanisms to support increased energy efficiency
• Designing efficient rates (including pricing risk mgt)
• Current issues in cost of capital
• Using customer research (“the voice of the customer”)
• Alternative regulation

New for 2008 - additions to the curriculum:

• Cost allocation
• Allocating costs to TOU periods
• Rate design
• Designing TOU rates for max customer acceptance
• Mechanisms to support energy efficiency (DSM trackers, decoupling, rate reform, incentive models)
• Cost of service overview
• CWIP vs AFUDC
• Using altreg mechanisms to smooth rate trajectories

New for 2008 – Student Projects

• For the integrated utility:
• Need to gear up efficiency on a sustainable business basis
• Need to add base load capacity, while smoothing rate impacts
• Need to preserve credit rating by mitigating regulatory lag
• For the unbundled utility:
• Need to address aging facilities
• Desire to deploy AMI
• Concerns re. rising ISO costs
• Concerns re. single digit allowed ROE

Registration and lodging

• To register please go to the EEI website.
• For questions regarding registration, contact Elizabeth Stipnieks at (202) 508-5566
• To book a room at the UW's Fluno Center, site of the program...
  • Call toll free (877) 773-5866 or click here to reserve your room online.  Be sure to note that you will be attending the EEI Electric Rate Advanced Course.
  • The Fluno Center is a short 15 minute taxi ride from the Dane County Regional Airport.  For local travel information, click here.

Course instructors in last name alphabetical order:

• Eric Ackerman
• Steve Braithwait
• Jon Kubler
• Mark Lowry
• Jim Sarikas
• Mike Vilbert
• Dick Wight

Eric Ackerman is Senior Manager of Regulatory Policy at Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of investor owned electric utilities.  He is the chief strategist for utility distribution company issues, providing national leadership on regulatory policy issues affecting EEI members at the distribution level. In this capacity he is leading the Innovative Rate Designs & Regulation component of the EEI Energy Efficiency Initiative, among other current assignments. 

Before joining EEI, Eric was a member of the technical staff of the MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia, where he participated in technology assessment projects involving renewable and coal-based synthetic fuels technologies.  He began his energy career as managing editor of Energy Digest, a Washington-based trade newsletter covering developments involving energy R&D, and energy policy. 

He holds a BA from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts; and an MBA from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Steven D. Braithwait, Ph.D. (University of California-Santa Barbara, 1976) is a Vice President.  He specializes in market-based retail electricity pricing with an emphasis on the measurement of customer price response, and the evaluation of demand response program benefits and costs.  Dr. Braithwait has also assisted clients in designing market-based service offerings including real-time pricing, critical peak pricing, and demand response programs.  He has provided expert testimony before public service commissions and arbitration panels in the areas of load forecasting and least-cost planning guidelines.  He has delivered papers at numerous industry conferences on the topics of market-based pricing, customer price response, demand response programs, and load forecasting.  Previously, Dr. Braithwait managed numerous projects in load forecasting, demand-side management and planning at EPRI.

Mark Newton Lowry is a partner of Pacific Economics Group LLC and manages its office on Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin.  He is the founder of the company’s practice in the fields of alternative regulation and statistical benchmarking.  His specific duties include the supervision of statistical cost research, the design of Altreg plans, and expert witness testimony.  His practice is international in scope and has included clients in Britain, Canada, Japan, and Latin America.  He can advise clients in French and Spanish as well as his native English.

He has testified numerous times on Altreg, benchmarking, and sundry other issues.  Venues for his testimony have included California, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oklahoma, New York, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia as well as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Before joining PEG, Dr. Lowry worked for several years at Christensen Associates in Madison, first as a senior economist and later as a Vice President and director of the company’s Regulatory Strategy practice.  His career has also included work as an academic economist.  He has served as an Assistant Professor of Mineral Economics at the Pennsylvania State University and as a visiting professor at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Montreal.  His academic research and teaching stressed the use of mathematical theory and econometrics in industry analysis.

In total, Dr. Lowry has two decades of experience as a practicing economist and fifteen years of experience in the field of utility regulation.  He holds a B.A. in Ibero-American studies and a Ph.D. in applied economics from the University of Wisconsin.  He has served as a referee for several scholarly journals and has an extensive record of professional publications and public appearances. 

Jim Sarikas has spent his career consulting with US and Canadian electric and gas utilities in the field of costing and pricing. He has presented expert testimony with respect to these subjects before eight state Public Service Commissions, three Canadian regulatory commissions, as well as the FERC.

Jim is a Vice President at Foster Associates located in the Washington, D.C. area and has successfully dealt with energy and public utility issues involving regulatory economics, supply, demand forecasting, in addition to, costing, pricing and rate design.  Further, Foster Associates has vast experience in the areas of accounting, engineering, finance, and valuation.

Jim is a graduate of the University of Washington with a B.A. degree in Economics. He also has an M.A. degree in Economics, Regulatory Option, from New Mexico State University.  

Since 1997, Jim has been the Edison Electric Institute’s primary lecturer on embedded cost of service studies for its annual Advanced Rate School. Jim also regularly teaches a short, semi-annual, course on how to prepare embedded cost of service studies for electric and gas companies sponsored by the Center for Public Utilities offered in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Michael Vilbert is a Principal with The Brattle Group

in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is an expert in financial planning, valuation and cost of capital estimation techniques who has advised clients on these matters in the context of a wide variety of investment, litigation and regulatory settings. He received his Ph.D. in Financial Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the University of Utah, and a B.S. degree from the United States Air Force Academy. He joined The Brattle Group

in 1994 after a career as an Air Force officer, where he served as a fighter pilot, intelligence officer, and professor of finance at the Air Force Academy.

Mr. Wight is founder and President of Energy Market Solutions. For the last several years, EMS’s consulting practice has centered on market and regulatory strategy development for utilities, in a way that meets their client’s needs, the client’s customer’s needs, and is acceptable to regulators.

Mr. Wight has had a leadership role in the areas of regulatory strategy development, rates & pricing, and load research for many years.

He currently serves on the faculty of the EEI Electric Rates Advanced Course at the University of Wisconsin where he teaches Pro-Active or Customer-Based Pricing and Regulatory Strategy. He has also served on the faculty of the EEI Utility Rate Fundamentals Course at Indiana University and the Georgia Tech Load Research Sampling Methods and Statistical Analysis Course.

Dick has over 35 years of utility management and consulting experience in distribution engineering, field operations, rate design, load research, marketing research, market planning, program development, and program evaluation.  Of those years, approximately 25 were with Georgia Power and Southern Company.

Mr. Wight holds a B. S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA degree in Marketing from Georgia State University.

He has been married to a very understanding wife for over 40 years, has two lovely daughters who are married to great men, and recently became a grandfather for the third time.