Dr. Hethie Parmesano

Education

PhD and MA in economics, Cornell University
BA in economics, Colby College

Experience

Dr. Hethie Parmesano is an expert on electricity, gas, and water industry costing, pricing, sector structure, and regulation. She recently retired from NERA as Senior Vice President, and continues as a Special Consultant to the firm. In recent years she has been involved with projects dealing with regulation, restructuring, and privatization of state-owned utilities in a variety of different settings, including the UK, Spain, Saudi Arabia, India, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Greece, El Salvador, Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Cambodia, and Mexico. Dr. Parmesano also has extensive experience with utility costing, pricing, and restructuring issues in the US and Canadian utility industries. Her work both in the US and abroad has involved issues such as regulating distribution companies, metering and settlement for customers with retail access, transmission pricing, rate structure for Provider-of-Last-Resort service, backup rates for distributed generation, real-time pricing and other innovative pricing options, and efficient pricing of bundled service. She teaches seminars on costing and pricing topics, and has testified widely on utility matters before regulatory agencies. She is a co-founder of NERA's industry group called the Marginal Cost Working Group.

Prior to joining NERA, Dr. Parmesano was staff economist at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and an economic analyst at the Los Angeles City Planning Department. She has also been a faculty member at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.