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Pat Wood, III Joins Corporate and State Regulatory Officials
WASHINGTON, D.C. -The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Pat Wood, III, is among the featured participants in a roundtable discussion on electricity competition sponsored today by The Progress & Freedom Foundation. Joining him are electricity experts from corporate, state regulatory and consulting capacities. During the session, Thomas M. Lenard, senior fellow and vice president for research at the Foundation, is releasing an article just published by Regulation magazine, “FERC’s New Regulatory Agenda.”
Participants in the discussion – “Electricity Market Design: How Prescriptive Should the Rules Be?” -- also include Anthony Alexander, president and COO of FirstEnergy, Raymond Gifford, chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, Kenneth Gordon, special consultant to NERA and former chairman of the Maine and Massachusetts Public Utility Commissions and Jim Kerr, a member of North Carolina Utilities Commission.
“During the last year and a half, the FERC has embarked on a significantly more regulatory coarse than it was on before,” Lenard writes in Regulation. “FERC’s regulatory activism is occurring without sufficient analysis of whether the approach will improve the functioning of markets or be beneficial to consumers.” The question, Lenard writes, is “whether competition can be achieved by substituting a new regulatory regime for the old one – as FERC is in the process of doing – or whether competition requires reducing the role of government in the marketplace.”
The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. It is a 501(c)(3) research & educational organization.
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