Las Vegas Nevada Lawyer
Howard Roitman:Injury Law
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Howard R. Roitman, has been practicing law for 22 years. Howard R. Roitman is one of the first attorneys to be recognized by the State Bar of Nevada as a Certified Specialist in Estate Planning. He is a member of the Bar in Nevada, California, New York, and the District of Columbia. He is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center (JD in 1984 and LL.M in taxation in 1985), and the Harvard Law School Mediation Program . He is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®), Charted Life Underwriter (CLU), and a Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC).
Howard Roitman serves as, A Settlement Judge at for Nevada Supreme Court; as a Short Trial Judge; Mediator and at The American Arbitration Association; is a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators; is a Mediator for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, A member of the Construction Specifications Institute and a Board member of the Nevada and Federal Bar Associations ADR Committees. Howard Roitman has been practicing personal injury for over 15 years has settled hundreds of cases and has been the principle lawyer in hundreds of filled lawsuits on behalf of injury victims.
NEVADA
LEGISLATIVE
COUNSEL BUREAU
JULY 2006
INSIDE THIS BRIEF
• PUBLIC UTILITY REGULATION
• STATE ENERGY POLICY
• POTENTIAL ENERGY ISSUES FOR THE FUTURE
• LOW INCOME ENERGY ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS
RESEARCH BRIEF ON
ENERGY
Utility service is of such fundamental importance to the welfare of citizens that it is deemed to be “affected with a public interest” and, therefore, subjected to pervasive governmental regulation to ensure availability at reasonable prices. The hallmark of this regulation is granting of an exclusive geographical franchise to a single provider, coupled with a duty to serve all customers within the assigned territory. In exchange, the utility is allowed the opportunity to earn a reasonable rate of return on “prudent” operations, the return being set by the regulators after administrative hearings.
PUBLIC UTILITY REGULATION
In Nevada, public utilities are under the jurisdiction of the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN), which consists of three commissioners appointed to four-year terms by the Governor. The PUCN sets retail rates for natural gas and electricity and its decisions are appealable to the courts. The Consumer’s Advocate of the Bureau of Consumer Protection within the Office of the Attorney General represents consumer interests before the PUCN.
The PUCN is charged with regulating public utilities in order to:
• Provide for fair and impartial regulation of public utilities;
• Provide for the safe, economic, efficient, prudent, and reliable
PREPARED BY SCOTT YOUNG
RESEARCH DIVISION
LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL BUREAU
Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA) was a law that was passed by the United States Congress to facilitate regulation of electric utilities, by either limiting their operations to a single state, and thus subjecting them to effective state regulation, or forcing divestitures so that each became a single integrated system serving a limited geographic area. Another purpose of PUHCA was to keep utility holding companies engaged in regulated businesses from engaging in unregulated businesses. PUHCA required that Securities and Exchange Commission approval be obtained by a holding company prior to engaging in a non-utility business and that such businesses be kept separate from the regulated business(es). It also authorize the SEC to flatten the corporate structure of utilities to remove unnecessary corporate layers. Individual operating utility companies could centralize certain business operations into central Service Companies, but all Service Companies would be subject to SEC and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulation. As a result, when a state utility commission regulated a utility located in a particular state, the rate payers of that state would pay only the share of common Service Company expenses allocated to it under SEC-approved formulas. This would prevent a Holding Company from double-recovery of its expenses when it operates in more than one state.
PUHCA was one of a number of trust-busting and securities regulation initiatives that were enacted in response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, including the collapse of Samuel Insull's public utility holding companies. By 1932, the eight largest utility holding companies controlled 73 percent of the investor-owned electric industry.[1] Their complex, highly-leverage corporate structures were very difficult for individual states to regulate.
One result of the act was the divestiture of utility owned electric streetcar companies, which were then acquired by oil and automobile companies and dismantled.
An important PUHCA provision prohibited sales of goods or services between Holding Company affiliates at a profit. These rules prevented the utilities from increasing their cost-based regulated rates by artificially marking-up the prices paid by the utility operating companies above what the central purchasing affiliate paid.
The utility industry and would-be owners of utilities lobbied Congress heavily to repeal PUHCA, claiming that it was outdated. On August 8, 2005, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law, repealing PUHCA, despite consumer, environmental, union and credit rating agency objections. The repeal became effective on February 8, 2006.
It was replaced by a much weaker set of laws called the "Public Utility Holding Company Act of 2005" which gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) a limited role in allocating the costs of multi-state electric utility holding companies to individual operating subsidiaries. et seq. The 2005 Act had many provisions which applied to just electric subsidiary to the exclusion of natural gas subsidiaries of Holding Companies. On December 8, 2005, FERC recommended that Congress amend the 2005 Act to give FERC (1) cost allocation authority over gas subsidiaries, and (2) greater enforcement authority over gas subsidiaries,[2] but Congress has not acted on FERC's request.
[edit] External links
- Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935: 1935 – 1992 by the United States Department of Energy
- Current Registered Holding Companies Under the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 at the SEC website
- PUHCA @ U.S. Code
- PUHCA for Dummies
- "PUCHA Repeal Thwarts Competition and Puts Consumers at Risk", Kanner, Marty, The Washington Times
- "Electricity Restructuring Background: Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA)"
- "Discarding PUHCA"
- PUHCA at Union of Concerned Scientists
- Article about PUHCA at Public Citizen
[edit] References
- ^ LEONARD S. HYMAN, AMERICA’S ELECTRIC UTILITIES: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE 74 (Public Utility Reports, Inc. 1988)
- ^ "[http://elibrary.ferc.gov/idmws/common/opennat.asp?fileID=10900380 Recommendations of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Technical and Conforming Amendments to Federal Law Necessary to Carry Out the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 2005 and Related Amendments]". Retrieved on 2008-09-30.
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Public utility
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (June 2008)
This article or section deals primarily with the United States and does not represent a worldwide view of the subject.
Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page."Utilities" redirects here. For other uses, see Utility (disambiguation).
A public utility (usually just utility) is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service (often also providing a service using that infrastructure). Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and regulation ranging from local community-based groups to state-wide government monopolies.
The term utilities can also refer to the set of services provided by these organizations consumed by the public: electricity, natural gas, water and sewage. Telephone services may also be included.
In the United States of America they are often natural monopolies because the infrastructure required to produce and deliver a product such as electricity or water is very expensive to build and maintain.[1] As a result, they are often government monopolies, or if privately owned, the sectors are specially regulated by a Public Utilities Commission.
Developments in technology have eroded some of the natural monopoly aspects of traditional public utilities. For instance, electricity generation, electricity retailing, telecommunication and postal services have become competitive in some countries and the trend towards liberalization, deregulation and privatization of public utilities is growing, but the network infrastructure used to distribute most utility products and services has remained largely monopolistic.
Public utilities can be privately owned or publicly owned. Publicly owned utilities include cooperative and municipal utilities. Municipal utilities may actually include territories outside of city limits or may not even serve the entire city. Cooperative utilities are owned by the customers they serve. They are usually found in rural areas. Private utilities, also called investor owned utilities, are owned by investors.[citation needed] Unlike private companies, private utilities may be listed on the stock exchange.[citation needed] Private, in this context, means not owned by the public or the government.
In poorer developing countries, public utilities are often limited to wealthier parts of major cities, as used to be the case in developed countries in the nineteenth century, but in some developing countries utilities do provide services to a large share of the urban population, such as in the case of water and sanitation in Latin America.
[edit] Common classifications of utilities in the United States
- CWD – County Water District
- FCWCD – Flood Control and Water Conservation District
- FWSD – Fresh Water Supply District
- ID – Irrigation District
- IOU - Investor-owned utility
- MWA – Municipal Water Authority
- MWD – Municipal Water District
- MUD – Municipal Utility District
- PUD – Public Utility District
- WA – Water Agency
- WCID – Water Control and Improvement District
- WD – Water District
- WS – Water System
- WSC – Water Supply Corporation
[edit] See also
- Common utility duct
- Electricity market
- Energy
- Firm service
- Liberalization
- NAICS 22
- National Rural Water Association
- Off-the-grid
- Public services
- Rate Case
- Telecommunications
- Universal service
- Utility cooperative
[edit] References
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- This page was last modified on 8 October 2008, at 11:05.
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