Forcing utilities to justify their distribution-system spending

Power utilities spend more on their local distribution systems than almost anything else now — roughly a third of their capital budgets, and the biggest driver of rising electricity bills — yet unlike generation and transmission, that spending faces almost no scrutiny before it's approved. In this episode, I talk with Minnesota regulators Sydnie Lieb and Pete Wyckoff about why distribution spending escapes the modeling and optimization the rest of the grid goes through, and what it would take to...