Articles by Sean Casten

Shoddy economics at The New York Times

Joe Romm has done a pretty thorough trashing of Matt Wald’s recent New York Times piece. Herein, I pile on. This is a shoddy enough piece of journalism to deserve […]

If it walks like a tax and quacks like a tax … then it’s called cap-and-trade?

In an otherwise solid post, David said something that made me cringe: In a cap-and-trade system where the pollution permits are auctioned, the money goes to gov’t, and the gov’t […]

Don’t make too much of current energy prices; they are disconnected from fundamentals

There is a fair amount of hand-wringing over the recent collapse in energy prices which — while academically interesting — is largely irrelevant to larger macro forces. Here then a […]

AEP wants rate increase to make up for revenue loss

Remember when Mike Morris, CEO of American Electric Power, said this?

[he] said "I'm not a decoupler. If my revenues go down, they go down."

The West Virginia arm of his utility is now asking for a series of rapid rate increases: 18.5 percent this year, 14.5 percent next year and 13.2 percent in 2011.

Why, pray tell?

In part, because:

The company had predicted it would sell $248.5 million in power to other electric utilities between July 2008 and this June, but those sales have almost disappeared. Revenue generated from those sales -- electricity unused by AEP customers -- keeps rates down.

So if AEP's revenues go down, they go down. But then they file a three-year, double-digit rate increase to make up for lost ground. "Not a decoupler" indeed.