Congratulations on your superior analysis.

I am an advisor to the Sierra Club.

There are three moving pieces in this case: the half-billion dollars locked into customer rates by the PJM auction in May for delivery in 2015, the billion dollars worth of transmission upgrades - mostly related to the FirstEnergy service area, although some of the costs fall into AEP territory, and the abundant efficiency and renewable alternatives that are cheaper.

We are reluctant to condemn FirstEnergy outright, simply because we need them to be a cooperative partner in this State. But we have every reason to want to flay their profits from profiteering, and to give them incentives to do things which save their customers money.

Our arguments are based on the fact that efficiency saves money. In the last year, renewables (wind) have become cheaper in Ohio than fossil fuels, notwithstanding all the garbage in the air about natural gas and fracking. Wind is still cheaper than fracked gas, unless they can keep their prices where they were two months ago for ten or fifteen years, which they can't do.

What we want to do is align utility economic signals with customer interests. Ohio is a state in transition, due to a flawed 1998 deregulation bill, which was fixed in 2008. WV is still a regulated state, which means that your regulators can figure out what we are doing right, and what we are doing wrong, and pick the winners. But if they don't do the homework, you all lose.

Coal is dead. It may take forty years to die, or it may take twenty years to die, but all the clowns who invested their billions in the coal industry were just as dumb as the guys who paid a quarter million dollars for a tulip bulb, about a hundred and thirty years ago. Coal can't compete with natural gas, and natural gas can't compete with efficiency or wind. In a couple of years, photovoltaics will also be cheaper than coal or natural gas.

So we see the crass manipulation of the PJM auction process by FE, and we want to correct it. Is the best response to reduce their rate of return to zero? Or is it to give them a healthy share of the money they save their customers, and cut their return on things they do that cost their customers money? Or both?

In 2011, the Ohio utilities spent about $300 million on efficiency programs., and saved about a billion dollars. The savings are highly speculative, and are probably closer to three billion, but we have arguments about that. What is certain is that the spending produced a net benefit in the first year, and that the installed technology will last an average of twelve years. West Virginia can have all that and more.

Ohio also has about a billion dollars worth of new wind turbines which are selling electricity into the market at such a low price that they are undercutting most of the utilities. The price of wind turbines is supposed to drop 20% in the next year or so.

West Virginia can have all of that, with some reservations about the amount of wind potential you have.

In spite of the massive dose of information and words in one of these utility cases, this is a small taste of the extensive flow of ideas and information that surround the case. Sierra Club filed its comments before the other parties you mentioned, and we were far more specific to the issues in the case - mostly because our traditional allies signed the stipulation when we did not.

The clean energy revolution is under way. It is sort of like the computer revolution, except that there are about three extra zeroes after the dollar sign. We are going to change the way this nation uses energy, not because we want to, but because what we want is cheaper. And getting cheaper each day.