Competition or Reliability in Electricity? What the Coming Policy Shift Means for Restructuring

In the new era of reliability-focused restructuring, the need to balance competition goals and reliability objectives is bringing policymakers to a large fork in the road. One choice is competition. Success along this road will likely require FERC to assume a more aggressive stance on the turnover of transmission control to independent entities or, preferably, to find ways to promote structural separation of generation and transmission. The other choice is reliability, which implies a dramatically reduced role for competition (and antitrust) in restructuring and thus, a greater role for regulation.