Mr. Graves specializes in regulatory and financial economics, especially for electric and gas utilities, and in litigation matters related to contract disputes and securities litigation. He has over 35 years of experience assisting utilities in forecasting, valuation, and risk analysis of many kinds of long-range system planning and strategic decisions, such as generation and network capacity expansion; supply procurement and hedging; service design, pricing and cost recovery mechanisms; distributed energy resource adoption; renewable asset selection and de-carbonization; and extreme risk resiliency planning.
He has testified before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and many state regulatory commissions, as well as in state and federal civil courts, on such matters as integrated resource planning (IRP), the prudence of prior investment and contracting decisions, incentives, risk management, costs and benefits of new services, policy options for industry restructuring, adequacy of market competition, and competitive implications of proposed mergers and acquisitions.
In the area of financial economics, he has assisted and testified in civil cases in regard to contract damages estimation, securities litigation suits, special purpose audits, tax disputes, and cost of capital estimation, and he has testified in criminal cases regarding corporate executives’ culpability for securities fraud.