Jeremy Carl, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy, along with Dian Grueneich, a former California Utilities commissioner, and their coauthors David Fedor and Cara Goldenberg, released a paper titled Renewable and Distributed Power in California; Simplifying the Regulatory Maze on Wednesday, November 28, 2012. George P. Shultz, the Thomas and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow and chair of the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy, announced the release of this study Wednesday afternoon at a meeting of the Power Association of Northern California, a trade group made up of leading figures in California’s power industry.
According to Carl, “Californians are currently spending billions of dollars annually on eleven different, often overlapping, renewable and distributed energy programs, with no clear lines of decision-making authority and little accountability or transparency. Also, no reliable cost information is available for many of these programs, and information about costs is often blacked out at supposedly public websites.”
The paper suggests several short- and long-term reforms to California’s regulatory policy in the electricity sector. As Carl notes, in a post about the paper on Advancing a Free Society, “These reforms are necessary if Californians want to ensure that their priorities of advanced, affordable, and reliable energy are not held hostage to the whims of regulators and politicians in Sacramento.”
Click here to read the full paper.
