Managing Environmental Collaboratives: A Manager's Perspective

Until recently, electric utilities have been quiet, stable industries. The last two decades have brought changes that have turned the utility business into a three-ring circus. One of the prominent factors affecting utilities is the greatly increased emphasis on environmental problems. Working with utilities, regulators, industrial concerns, and environmentalists on environmental collaboratives to establish utility policy is like running the wild animal act at the circus. Fortunately, management science provides us with such tools as optimizing models to help us to quantify the costs of various proposals. Unfortunately, the models often provide so much data that it is difficult to filter out useful decision-making information. Other techniques, such as multi-attribute trade-off and measuring percent changes, have added only a little light. We now need to apply additional MS tools, such as decision trees and expected values, to the problem, and we are starting to do so.