Replacement Cost Asset Valuation and Regulation of Energy Infrastructure Tariffs

Abstract

In Australia, access tariffs (rental charges) paid by third party users to the owners of energy transmission assets (e.g., gas pipelines) are determined by regulators on the basis of their depreciated optimized replacement cost (known as DORC). Reliance on the replacement cost, rather than actual cost, of existing assets inflates tariffs and incites the criticism that asset owners earn a return on investments of a scale never made. The economic rationale of the regulators’ model is that it emulates the workings of a contestable market, by setting tariffs at a level just short of that required to motivate a new entrant (system duplication). Properly reconstructed, this model constitutes a dynamic and internally consistent theory of replacement cost valuation and depreciation. Its mathematical consequences, however, especially with regard to the valuation of sunk assets with long times to expiry, are shown to be practically and politically unpalatable. In particular, the implied tariff levels for such assets are very close to those that would apply to new infrastructure assets built today at today's prices. Regulators unwilling to accept this implication of a new‐entrant‐exclusion pricing logic are left with no alternative framework for DORC.

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