中文摘要
20世纪90年代的电力行业重组终结了许多州纵向一体化垄断的时代，使非公用事业发电商能够向公用事业企业售电；在较少数州，重组还使零售服务提供商能够从发电商处购电并向终端用户销售。我们回顾了支持重组的经济学论据及其在随后数年产生的影响。我们认为，推动重组的最大政治动机是租金转移，而非效率提升。尽管电力行业重组带来了效率提升，但总体上仍被视为令人失望，因为一些倡导者所作出的降价承诺是建立在政治上不可持续的租金转移之上的。事实上，重组以来电价的变化更多是由发电技术进步和天然气价格波动等外生因素驱动，而非由重组本身驱动。我们认为，当前分布式发电（主要是屋顶太阳能光伏系统）背后的政治势头也基于类似的机制：从社会角度看，分布式发电仍然成本高昂，但由于其能够促成租金转移，从私人角度看却具有经济性。
Abstract
Electricity restructuring in the 1990s ended the era of vertically integrated monopolies in many states, allowing nonutility generators to sell electricity to utilities and, in fewer states, allowing retail service providers to buy electricity from generators and sell to end-use customers. We review the economic arguments for restructuring and the resulting effects in subsequent years. We argue that the greatest political motivation for restructuring was rent shifting, not efficiency improvements. Although electricity restructuring has brought efficiency improvements, it has generally been viewed as a disappointment because the price-reduction promises made by some advocates were based on politically unsustainable rent transfers. In reality, electricity rate changes since restructuring have been driven more by exogenous factors, such as generation technology advances and natural gas price fluctuations, than by restructuring. We argue that a similar dynamic underpins the current political momentum behind distributed generation, primarily rooftop solar photovoltaic systems, which remains costly from a societal viewpoint, but privately economic owing to the rent transfers it enables.