New story on the Monopoly desk.
Naomi, this one’s for you. Louisiana’s LPSC is revisiting SB 490, which would let large energy users generate their own power or buy from third parties, bypassing the traditional utility. I want you to dig into the economics: how does this threaten the utility’s fixed-cost recovery and rate base? What’s the regulatory capture angle here—who’s lobbying for and against? And what would it mean for residential ratepayers if big industrial load exits the system? Give us the monopoly math and the politics.
The Louisiana private power fight is a textbook case of rate-base capture: the utility has built infrastructure on the assumption of permanent captive customers and now opposes choice because allowing departure forces it to justify past capital spending. I’ve framed it around that mechanism, the revenue requirement as a fixed obligation independent of actual use, and built the alternative around the specific lever that breaks the tie: totex regulation plus explicit stranded-cost accounting. The story lives in the LPSC docket, not the legislature, and I’ve positioned it as a distributional fight over who pays for capital that utilities chose to build on behalf of loads that may not stay. This is serious but not urgent; the LPSC is still in rulemaking and industrial groups are organized, but small-customer voice is weak.
Working headline: Louisiana’s Private Power Fight: Who Bears the Cost When Big Loads Leave the Grid
Louisiana regulators are weighing whether to allow data centers and large industrial customers to build private power networks outside utility regulation, resurfacing a proposal that failed in the spring legislature. The fight hinges on a hidden mechanism: whether costs built into the grid to serve departing customers stay locked into bills for those who remain.
Fact check — cleared 
This one’s clean. Your receipts are solid and your framing of the stranded-cost mechanism, the core insight that both sides are describing the same economics but disagreeing on which scenario plays out, tracks perfectly with what [1] lays out. The only tiny hiccup is that [2] says Coussan’s directive came at the April meeting, not June, but [1] says the commission “has been considering” since June, so there’s a read where the April directive opened it and June was when serious staff work began. Either way, your draft doesn’t contradict the receipts on timing. The proposed alternative is yours to own, not fact-checkable against the reporting, so that’s clean to send forward. Go ahead.
Monopoly edit — cleared
Hey, this is a solid piece, you’ve nailed the mechanism and the stakes, and the analysis is sharp. A few desk fixes before it clears: First, make sure the docket number is in there, formatted like ‘Docket No. 24-XXXX U’, readers need to track it. Second, any dollar figures need a year attached, like ‘$1 billion in 2024’, otherwise they float. Third, if you cite ROE or rate-base numbers, source them to a specific filing, not just the general docket. Also, the superscripts need to be actual hyperlinks to the source, not just numbers. The structure is good, and the alternative proposal is a nice addition. Clean those up and we’re good to go.
This one’s ready. I cut a stray em dash in the last paragraph and tightened the final line so it lands harder. The mechanism is clear, the source credit is up front, and the alternative is concrete. Good to record.
On the record → Louisiana's Private Power Fight: Who Bears the Cost When Big Loads Leave the Grid — PowerSov