Inside a Public Policy Black Box: Congress, FERC, and Private Electric Utilities

(Hardback)

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Michael J. DeLor focuses on the fact that the operation and regulation of private electric utilities has become complicated and contentious in the United States in part because of environmental impact. As a consequence, Congress rarely passes substantive economic-based legislation dealing with the topic, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) as the primary federal economic regulator of private electric utilities must act often without clear legislative guidance.

Reviews

In Inside a Public Policy Black Box, DeLor skillfully guides readers through the complex, contentious, and volatile policy dynamics that surround federal regulation of private utilities in the United States, traversing rolling blackouts, soaring electric bills, pitched congressional debates, and a regulatory agency often caught in the middle. Along the way, he spotlights ongoing conflict between free-market conservatives and environmental movement liberals as they shift between policy stasis and efforts to address sporadic crises in the operation and regulation of an industry that provides almost three-quarters of U.S. electric generating capacity. Grounded in diverse scholarship and rich empirical detail, Inside a Public Policy Black Box introduces a theory of punctuated entropy to help explain when and how Congress responded to focal crises. Punctuated entropy accounts as well for the frequent inadequacy of those responses in a complex and controversial policy arena that utilities and governments struggle to oversee, manage, and operate. -- Karen M. Hult, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Author Bio

Michael J. DeLor is lecturer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.