Competitive Power Principles
The Electric Power Supply Association is powered by shared perspectives on how electricity markets can achieve the best results for the power grid, customers, and our environment. The following principles guide our policy positions and advocacy efforts:
- Competitive wholesale power markets are the most effective tool to achieve policy objectives by encouraging private capital deployment and innovation at the lowest cost while appropriately shifting investment risk to resource developers and operators, not consumers.
- Evolving the resource mix through competitive power markets is the most cost-effective and holistic way to ensure grid reliability. Resource-specific, out-of-market reliability contracts or other out-of-market actions are less efficient.
- EPSA supports efforts to combat climate change through transparent, open, and nondiscriminatory competitive markets, such as an economy-wide price on carbon, that allow all resources to compete to reduce carbon and other harmful emissions. Competitive markets that incorporate both environmental and reliability requirements will yield the lowest cost set of resources and technologies that jointly produce the greatest emission abatement while maintaining reliability.
- Customers should have the right to choose their energy mix; and properly constructed competitive power markets allow all customers to choose the products and services they desire while investment risk remains with resource developers and operators.
- Competitive power markets and regulated tariffs should not be unduly discriminatory and should provide all market participants and investors sufficient confidence that they will have the opportunity to recover their investment and incentivize them to continue to make additional investments.
