Playbook for Advocates and Regulators

The playbook offers a structured set of questions for advocates and regulators to use across pre-filing, planning, and ratemaking proceedings. It emphasizes the need to clarify who bears the cost of distribution investments, especially when load or distributed energy resource (DER) forecasts are inaccurate, and suggests the use of guardrails like cost caps and reconciliation rules to protect residential customers.

• Cost allocation and recovery frameworks act as guardrails for distribution investments by defining payment responsibilities, recovery methods, and risk exposure in the event of incorrect forecasts.
• Regulators and advocates should use pre-filing venues—such as electrification proceedings, stakeholder meetings, or working groups in Massachusetts and Minnesota—to determine how costs are split between general ratepayers and specific groups like DER customers, large data centers, and transportation electrification load customers.
• During planning proceedings, it is critical to stress test the range of bill impacts and ratepayer consequences if the uptake of DERs or load growth occurs more slowly than forecasted.
• To prevent cost shifts to residential customers, the document recommends implementing specific guardrails, including staged approvals, reconciliation rules, and cost caps.
• Cost recovery should be tied to the outcomes and metrics established during planning dockets, whether the recovery is backward-looking (evaluating if outcomes were met) or forward-looking (setting eligibility criteria for recovery).

APA

RMI (2026). Playbook for Advocates and Regulators. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2026/06/cost-allocation-checklist-5_2026.pdf

Chicago

RMI. Playbook for Advocates and Regulators. 2026. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2026/06/cost-allocation-checklist-5_2026.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=Playbook for Advocates and Regulators |date=May 2026 |url=https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2026/06/cost-allocation-checklist-5_2026.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2026playbook, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{Playbook for Advocates and Regulators}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2026}, month = may, url = {https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2026/06/cost-allocation-checklist-5_2026.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }