Bill aims to ban utilities from using ratepayer funds for political expenses | Hacker News Reader

Bill aims to ban utilities from using ratepayer funds for political expenses

energyandpolicy.org

56 pointsmiguelazo13 comments

> In Florida, NextEra Energy’s Florida Power & Light spent millions of dollars on political consultants who engineered a scheme to siphon votes to third-party “ghost candidates” who were recruited to appear on the ballot for competitive state Senate seats without actually running, according to reporting by the Orlando Sentinel. The utility-backed effort targeted legislators who were trying to hold the utility accountable, the Sentinel reported.

What.The.HELL!?

I'm sooo tired of the criminaling. Just be decent people. How hard is that?!

be decent people

it seems harder than it should be, but yes, this is the crux of most of the worlds problems. if we want to create a better future for ourselves, the primary problem we need to address is how to get people to care for others and just be decent people.

there is only one way to address this for the long term. better education. we need to stop focusing on just STEM and realize that an important goal of education needs to be to teach everyone to be better people.

> expenses relating to attendance or participation in any formal proceeding before a regulatory commission are also prohibited from recovery.

States require such participation, e.g. in the form of myriad document filings. Ratepayer revenue may be a utility's only revenue. How should such a utility pay its employees who produce filings for the state PUC?

Shareholders' funds?

Why should shareholders put up those funds, and where do they get them from if not the running business?

Do you expect that shareholders should run a permanent loss on the business?

I haven't read the proposed legislation but I expect in practical terms it means such expenditure can't be treated as a business expenditure for tax purposes but still impacts the balance sheet. Whether or not that's good or bad I have no opinion.

I seriously doubt those expenses would result in a permanent (or even a single year's) loss under that scenario.

What are shareholder funds? Are you saying that there would be a capital call to shareholders to pay operating expenses? I’m not sure I understand this term as related to how corporations pay expenses.

Shareholders get paid dividends right?

Have a firm loan the utility the costs and recover them from the dividend payments.

Dividends come out of profits and profits come out of revenue.

“Recovering from the dividend” is just another way of saying you are using revenues to pay for something.

Paying a dividend out and then taking part back is not only inefficient but would still violate any prohibition to spend revenue on something.

If you wanted to do this, it’s just the same as reducing the dividend by some amount and the paying that amount out to a different expense.

Also, dividends are post tax so this is super inefficient in that you wouldn’t be able to deduct the expense if wanted to pay out as dividend and then have shareholders pay the expense.

They do not literally mean that money collected from ratepayers can't be used to pay political expenses.

I'm not an expert in this, but roughly speaking the way utility rate regulation works is that rates are set at a level that gives the utility a certain return on capital. (roc = profit/equity = (revenue - expenses) / equity).

What they probably want is for political spending to be excluded from the expenses section of that formula for the purposes of the rate setting calculation. (They would still appear there in GAAP financial statements.)

So the utility would pay those expenses by accepting reduced profits.

This would be a sea change in Virginia politics, which are dominated by Dominion Energy, the local regulated utility.

I've always felt it that it was wrong for a regulated utility to have so much influence in the Commonwealth. If I'm reading the article correctly, at least now their profits will reduce to the extent they are directly lobbying or donating, providing some counterpressure on their outsized influence.

This actually sounds pretty reasonable to me, and I think would be a positive step forward in terms of transparency and accountability.

If I understand the proposal correctly, there are some activities that utilities are prohibited from pursuing using ratepayer funds or pushing those costs down into the rate base, and for other types of costs, the burden of proof is borne by the utility to justify whether charging those costs back to the ratepayers (I.e., including them in the rate base) is fair, reasonable and justifiable.

If a utility wants to pursue these activities, they certainly can, but the costs to do it will come out of their “discretionary” funds - so that it’ll reduce the reasonable rate of return they’re entitled to receive on their costs to provide services.

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