MICHELE ZARRI

Managing Consultant

Michele is a Managing Consultant and a regulatory economist with 10 years’ experience in the UK energy and water sectors. He has worked on several price controls including RIIO T1 and RIIO T2 (electricity transmission), and PR24 (water and sewerage networks) for both regulators and major utilities, including National Grid and Thames Water.

Michele has an extensive background in economic regulation, covering the development of business plan submissions, the design of incentive-based regulation and the conduct of econometric and statistical analyses. He is adept with both the R and Stata statistical software.

Most recently, Michele supported Thames Water with the development of the business plan for PR24, contributing to all aspects of Thames Water proposal for capital investments to enhance the level of service, including the definition of investment need, customer engagement, econometric modelling and drafting of the regulatory submissions. He also developed a delivery incentive mechanism for a large investment to improve the resilience of the water network in London.

Prior to this, Michele supported National Grid in the RIIO T2 price review. He developed the Uncertainty Mechanisms (UM) framework, drafted licence provisions to implement the price control, and helped National Grid challenge Ofgem’s econometric benchmarking of operational expenditures. He also conducted an econometric estimation of the incremental cost of adding capacity to the transmission network which informed the UM framework for RIIO T2.

At Ofgem, Michele led the cost assessment of several investments in offshore and onshore electricity networks under the RIIO T1 and Offshore Electricity Transmission Owner (OFTO)  regimes and developed an econometric model for benchmarking export cable costs.
Michele holds a First-Class Graduate Diploma in Economics (BSc Honours equivalent) from the University of London, an MSc in Energy & Climate Change from the University of Edinburgh, and a First-Class Bachelor’s in Laws from the University of Bologna. Prior to becoming an economist, Michele trained as a solicitor in Italy and worked in private practice and as an in-house adviser for many years.

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