Confidentiality and secrecy in the stranded cost process can stifle public debate and prevent embarrassing or anticompetitive requests from being aired in public forums. In some cases, blatant subsidies for unregulated utility businesses have been included in stranded cost requests, but the public was kept in the dark by gag orders. In many other cases, utilities use one set of numbers that yield high estimates of stranded costs while using different numbers to say that their nuclear plants are cost-effective. The public needs to know these things. Legislators and governors would be impeached, recalled, or voted out of office if they levied secret taxes without telling the public why they were needed.
Electric ratepayers deserve no less.
Do not permit regulators to give utilities operating subsidies for existing generation. What is past may be stranded. Future costs are almost never stranded and can be avoided by closing uneconomic plants. Subsidies distort markets. They can reduce the market price, increasing the stranded costs assigned to unsubsidized assets.