The Energy Markets Podcast

Dena Wiggins, president and CEO of the Natural Gas Supply Association, which includes the Center for LNG, urges policymakers to recognize that "markets are working" and rejects export bans and price controls as an answer to the energy crunch consumers face today. "Markets do work," Wiggins says. "We really believe in the operation of a market. And rather than having a regu...

At Harvard Law School's Electricity Law Initiative, Ari Peskoe works to promote market entry for clean energy, parsing through an arcane world of obsolete federal and state laws, most of which is up to a century old and even older and was not written with our current electricity needs in mind. Peskoe says he prefers the competitive market model to the monopoly utility approach to regulating e...

Maggie Shober is a utility analyst and clean-energy advocate with the Southeast Alliance for Clean Energy. She spends a great deal of her time working the IRP processes state-by-state for the various large utilities in the region, such as Duke, Florida Power & Light,  Southern Co. and the Tennessee Valley Authority, to ensure that utility planning embraces clean-energy resources and other meas...

Court Rich, an attorney representing solar developers and others before the Arizona Corporation Commission, recounts how the state's 20-year-old law promoting retail competition in electricity was thwarted for years by the state's utilities and then, recently, ultimately repealed after an army of more than a hundred lobbyists descended on the Legislature. The bill, through some sleight-o...

Jason Stanek, chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission, talks about competitive retail power markets,  the commission's recent decision to allow supplier consolidated billing, the treatment of state-subsidized resources in FERC-regulated wholesale power markets, and Maryland state policies to address the climate-change threat by rate-basing  offshore wind, battery storage and EV bat...

Joy Ditto, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association, discusses her member utilities' efforts to transition to a clean-energy grid within the traditional vertically integrated utility construct. She provides a mixed view of the benefits APPA-member utilities have enjoyed as a result of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's open-access wholesale power market regime,...

Pat Wood III was at the forefront of important pro-consumer electricity policy changes 20 years ago as the former chairman of both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Public Utility Commission of Texas. While his pro-competition agenda at FERC was stymied by political blowback, the past 20 years have shown the wisdom of pro-competition policies in electricity, he says, calling for cur...

Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum sees competitive markets and traditional vertically integrated monopoly utilities as equally capable of delivering pro-consumer results in the transition to a clean-energy grid and economy. But both need better oversight in order to deliver on that promise, he says. Slocum calls for greater diversity of stakeholder representation in the competitive regional whole...

Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, an international trade group advocating for transmission development in North America, discusses the broad and systematic difficulties in getting necessary long-distance transmission lines sited and built. He shares his views on ongoing developments before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy and in Congress that aim...

Phil Moeller, , Executive Vice President, Business, Operations Group and Regulatory Affairs at the Edison Electric Institute, discusses net energy metering, infrastructure development and FERC's docket on updating its transmission policy, including ROFR, whether utilities should be the sole source of electricity for EV charging in monopoly-regulated states, the threat of cyber attacks on the...

Few in the electric industry can boast Alison Silverstein's achievements in contributing to pro-consumer, pro-competitive reforms at both the state and federal levels. And there is perhaps no one better situated to discuss the causes and ramifications of last year's deadly weather-induced grid outage in Texas last year. Perhaps most intriguing, however, is Silverstein's call for bui...

Economist and renewables-enabling transmission policy influencer Rob Gramlich gives high marks to the past year's efforts by the Biden Administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in terms of moving the needle on policy restraints that have for years stymied development of necessary electricity transmission infrastructure nationally. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (...

Dan Dolan of the New England Power Generators Association explains his members' concerns with subsidized resources in the region's wholesale power market, and the recent ballot initiative in Maine affecting a 145-mile, $1 billion transmission line designed to bring subsidized Canadian hydropower to Massachusetts. The market overseen by ISO-New England has resulted in cost savings for con...

The Electric Power Association's Todd Snitchler discusses the challenges facing traditional merchant power generators in the transition to a clean energy grid, calling for an economywide price on carbon as part of the  grid transformation required to meet the climate change threat. Studies show relatively small price on carbon can achieve a "dramatic reduction" in harmful emissions,...

University of Colorado economist Lynne Kiesling, recently appointed to DOE's electricity advisory panel, discusses the need for policy makers to promote technology innovation as part of efforts to decarbonize the grid in response to climate change. Support the show

Denis George, Manager, Legal and Energy, for Kroger stores, speaks to the different regulatory environments the company must navigate in the 42 states in which it operates more than 3,000 stores. The states that allow customer choice allow the company to operate more flexibly, to more easily meet Kroger's climate-change goals, and to realize cost-savings that it can pass on to its customers....

Jeff Dennis, managing director and general counsel for the Advance Energy Economy and Advanced Energy Buyers group, discusses the need for organized competitive wholesale power markets across the country as a pre-requisite for meeting the Biden administration's goal of a zero-carbon grid by 2035. The organization that includes leading information technology giants like Google, Microsoft and F...

Mark Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund says a clean energy standard combined with a clear market-based structure at wholesale regionally offers the best and least-cost approach to attaining a zero-carbon electricity grid by 2035, as called for by President Biden. Having a strong national policy that sets standards for carbon and environmental performance is an essential framework, and w...

Frank Lacey,  president and founder of Electric Advisors Consulting, explains how retail electricity competition in the dozen of so states outside of Texas is failing consumers, the economy and the environment. Lacey also explains how static comparisons of monopoly utility electricity prices with those offered by competitive suppliers, as is in vogue among some state officials to argue against com...

Veteran energy lawyer and regulator Jim Cawley discusses his experience as a utility regulator in Pennsylvania, first under the old regulated utility monopoly model and then again later, after the state restructured its retail electricity market to promote competition. He talks about how the state's market-based approach to utility regulation has saved consumers countless dollars and helped p...

The deep freeze-induced Great Texas Grid Failure was not because of the electricity market. If anything, Texas doesn't have enough of a market for electricity. So says R Street's Devin Hartman, standing by his description of an enhanced Texas-style approach to electricity, a market-based approach, as the "gold standard" all policy makers should embrace to meet the Biden adminis...

In episode 3 of the Energy Markets Podcast host Bryan Lee talks with Nora Mead Brownell, who as a state regulator in Pennsylvania helped oversee the state's late 1990s transition from monopoly regulation to a competitive market  electricity. She then was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where she teamed with Pat Wood III to promote regional wh...

A discussion with former FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff regarding the best public policies in support of a 21st Century clean-energy grid; - a consideration of the root cause of the historic grid failure in Texas and whether renewable energy or state regulation were factors; - are traditional fossil-fired generators 'dinosaurs' or is the market failing to provide an adequate revenue strea...

Host Bryan Lee talks with Rob Gramlich of Grid Strategies about the energy market and climate change priorities of the Biden administration and incoming Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Rich Glick. Support the show