Cost-of-Service and Rate Studies
Our cost-of-service and rate studies provide essential information to innovative cost recovery from ratepayers for electric, gas, wastewater, water, and telecommunications services.
Our cost-of-service and rate design studies recover your costs while using traditional and innovate rate designs for new services:
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We prepare cost-of-service and rate design studies for electric, gas, wastewater, water, and broadband providers.
Determining the cost of service is the “science” part of the rate development process. We use industry standards to assign costs to customer classes and determine the cost to serve. With the availability of real-time data, we can assign costs more directly and confidently to determine the actual cost to serve each customer class and individual large customers.
The cost-of-service models are tailored to your organization and included in the project deliverables.
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Rate design is the “art” of the rate development process. We design rates for broadband, electric, gas, wastewater, and water services that will recover your costs.
The recommended rate structures are designed to maintain your organization’s financial health and meet your strategies.
As all utility businesses are constantly changing, we tailor innovative rates such as time-of-use rates for all customers, competitive broadband rates, water conservation rates, decoupling, marginal costs rates and rates for distributed generation and electric vehicles.
The cost-of-service models are tailored to your organization and included in the project deliverables.
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The cost-of-service and rate design models are included in the project deliverables for you to use in-house for future analysis.
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Long-range forecasting is an essential step in providing future reliable services. We work with your team to develop 5, 10, 15, and 20-year forecasts based on current industry trends. Forecasting will give your organization financial and operational options and leverage in negotiations.
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We provide testimony and supporting economic analysis in your rate case before FERC, state commissions, arbitration, and in litigation matters.
If your regulation is local, we are skilled at presenting rate studies before your Board or City Council. We are adept at distilling technical reports for a non-technical audience.
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We evaluated the utility's cost of service and designed rates for emerging customer needs in distributed generation, residential and industrial time-of- use, and electric vehicles for an east coast utility.
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We prepared a cost of service and rate design for electric, gas, wastewater, and water rates for a Florida municipal utility. The electric rates included rates for wholesale customers and gas rates included allocations for gas transport customers.
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A midwest utility wished to reduce customer class rate subsidies. We prepared a cost of service and rate design that transitioned customers towards their cost of service and helped minimize cross-class subsidies. Our work involved customer relations and messaging on new rate structures.
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A Midwest cooperative wished to expand its broadband services in a competitive market. We evaluated the competitive cost structure of broadband services and made recommendations for pricing and marketing of managed network services.
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We have performed hundreds of cost of service and rate design studies for electric, water, wastewater, gas, and broadband organizations. This breadth of experience has allowed us to design rates tailored to our client’s situation and changing customer needs.