But what a university sees as a no-brainer cost reduction, a utility often sees as a threat to sales.
They frequently depend on venture-capital funds which are dwarfed by the cost of even a single utility-scale power plant.
American Electric Power (AEP) chose to delay its plans to build a wind farm in Indiana when the heavily indebted utility found its cost of capital had soared because of turmoil in the corporate-bond market.
The current low cost of natural gas in North America translates into the ability for microgrids to provide lower cost energy services than the incumbent utility grid.
Our Broadband Acceleration Initiative has reduced barriers to network buildout by lowering the cost of stringing new fiber on utility poles and reducing wait times to get approval for new cell towers.
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To this has to be added the cost of treating health insurance like a utility: regulating prices and stopping insurers cherry-picking and lemon-dropping.
This progress in the utility businesses has not come without cost.
Or, if you think that the marginal utility of taxpayer income and the efficiency cost of taxing are both very low, consider the opportunity cost of government spending.
Opponents of a Congressional plan to mandate a minimum amount of renewable energy for most utility companies say it will increase the cost of power in states where wind power is not prevalent.
Most of today's plants were built in an era when central planners or state utility boards had no idea of the true cost of capital.
There are also concerns that if utility companies faced this extra charge they would pass the cost onto customers, making gas and electricity more expensive.
Value charging is a unique feature that harnesses the power of cloud computing to automatically charge the vehicle when utility rates are lowest, thus helping to minimize the cost to charge the vehicle and the potential ownership costs of an electric vehicle.
There is still much we need to learn about its utility in certain groups, especially the elderly, and its cost effectiveness.
Since John is still doing his laundry during peak load hours, the utility is paying top dollar in infrastructure costs and high-cost backup power plants.
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Think of the debt as a sunk cost (I am reminded of all those nuclear reactors that weighed down utility stocks in the 1980s and 1990s).
The Government has come under increasing pressure from trade unions and Labour backbenchers to help poorer families deal with the rising cost of energy via a one-off tax on the profits of utility companies.
Lawyers, meantime, are realizing that their relationships with energy and utility companies are no longer untouchable and that winning does have a cost.
By contrast, a public utility would not be subject to shareholder demands for dividend payouts and imprudent cost cuts.
Jain: What we need in India -- and in other emerging markets -- is a low-cost access device which can make the Internet a mass-market service, a utility service.
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Maybe some company could offer a reprocessing service that gives the utility a smaller quantity of waste for the repository plus some nuclear fuel to help offset the cost.
For energy consumers, such a strategy, if successful, will inevitably mean shortages of energy, and higher costs at the fuel pump, in our home utility bills, at grocery and clothing stores, and in any other good or service whose cost is in any way dependent on the cost of energy or transportation.
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To understand the importance of the mix, says Max Warburton of Bernstein Research, compare the cost of producing a small car such as the popular Fiat 500 with that of making a hulking sport-utility vehicle such as the Audi Q7.
It is completely unacceptable that utility companies think they can claim for huge amounts of money, that business customers have already covered the cost for.
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