The Energy Markets Podcast

Commissioner Mark Christie of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been a prominent advocate of the need to overhaul the competitive market design at the heart of the regional wholesale power markets that have evolved in the U.S. over the past 25 years (" It's time to reconsider single-clearing price mechanisms in U.S. energy markets ", Energy Law Journal, May 2, 2023). The...

Massachusetts is actively considering Gov. Maura Healey's longstanding demand to end competitive retail energy sales to residential customers. As part of this debate in Massachusetts and elsewhere, the Retail Energy Advancement League commissioned the Analysis Group's Paul Hibbard, a former Massachusetts utility regulator,  to provide a comprehensive examination of retail energy choice....

There's something like a couple dozen proposals now for development of small modular reactors (SMRs), widely seen as the future of nuclear power as a participant in the clean-energy transition. Publicly traded NuScale* is at the vanguard of this trend. We spoke with the Nuclear Energy Institute's Matt Crozat about the prospects for SMRs and nuclear's role in the clean-energy transit...

Burned by an aborted nuclear power plant new build that saddled the state's consumers with hundreds of millions of dollars in needless costs for years to come, South Carolina's Act 187 established a legislative study committee to ponder whether the state's electricity consumers might not be better off with competitive reforms of the Palmetto State's 150-year-old monopoly regula...

Grid Strategy's Rob Gramlich and Electric Advisors Consulting's Frank Lacey detail the findings of a policy analysis paper they co-authored, Serving Customers Best: The Benefits of Competitive Electric Vehicle Charging Stations .* We also talk with Doug Kantor, general counsel for NACS, the international association for the convenience store industry, which sponsored the policy analysis....

Texas lawmakers just concluded their 88th biennial legislative session in Austin, and energy issues were very much at the fore as a range of proposals that would have incentivized investment in gas-fired generation and disincentivized renewables were hotly contested.  The R Street Institute's Josiah Neeley discusses the energy-related aspects of the session, which he said could have turned ou...

We reached out to ITC Holdings Corp. for the transmission owner's view on monopoly transmission development and the incumbent transmission owner's right of first refusal, known by the acronym ROFR, to build new interregional transmission grid projects. The issue has come to the fore as the federal government plans to undertake a massive buildout of the U.S. transmission network, and sepa...

Back in the 1990s, the University of Delaware's Willett Kempton conducted early vehicle-to-grid (V2G) experiments with PJM, operator of the MidAtlantic region's wholesale power market, testing the feasibility of using electric vehicles to provide regulation services to the grid. In this episode, Kempton speaks to the progress that's been made in the intervening decades to set the st...

Rich Glick, in his first wide-ranging interview since denied a second term at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, discusses the need for building out the transmission grid and for reforms to wholesale power markets to better accommodate the evolving resource mix toward more renewable, intermittent resources. Competitive wholesale power market reforms a...

William Hogan, the Raymond Plank Research Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, along with his colleague Scott Harvey, are the architects of the market structure employed in every competitive regional wholesale power market in the United States, known as the bid-based, security constrained economic dispatch model with locational marginal prices. This mar...

MIT economist Tim Schittekatte (tsgee-teh-kah-tuh) details his recent working paper, Electricity Rate Design in a Decarbonizing Economy: An analysis of time-of-use and critical peak pricing . Two of his co-authors are lions of energy economics, MIT economists Paul Joskow and Richard Schmalensee. The paper finds that a combination of time-of-use (TOU) and critical peak pricing (CPP) at retail can a...

More than ten years ago, Dominion Energy convinced Virginia lawmakers to clip the wings of the state's utility regulator, the State Corporation Commission. After a decade in which Virginia Power overcollected on its rates as an unregulated monopoly, the Legislature in Richmond had finally had enough and passed legislation restoring the SCC's utility ratemaking authority.  In this episode...

Jason Stanek, the lame duck chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission, is riding out the remainder of his term in office with a "maximum enforcement" campaign to crack down on retail suppliers "that engage in deceit, confusion, and trickery in order to close the deal." January saw the second-highest number of consumer complaints received, and February is shaping up to...

Davante Lewis credits grassroots community organizing and coalition building for helping him defeat a long-time incumbent to garner a seat on the five-member Louisiana Public Service Commission. Lewis – who professes he's a regulator and "policy nerd" and not a politician – aspires to assuring the clean-energy transition is also a just transition. He wants to transform his Louisiana...

Chris Carmody, executive director at Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association, says energy-intensive electricity customers will leave or not relocate to the Carolinas because of the difficulties they face buying their energy needs from the resource mix they prefer. There's "no tolerance for anything that resembles competition. And that really is to the detriment of economic developmen...

Josiah Neeley, the Austin-based research fellow and Texas director with the libertarian-leaning R Street Institute, discusses a recent letter that the think tank and some 30 other interest groups sent to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm urging that DOE, when it is allocating funding under the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill, to take into account areas of the country that have...

California ISO's Chief Operating Officer, Mark Rothleder, details a new study finding that an enhanced day-ahead market, or EDAM, encompassing all 38 balancing authorities in the West, would provide billions of dollars in economic savings for consumers. But EDAM is not a Regional Transmission Organization. Utilities would still control their grid systems. The construct lacks the independent g...

The California Solar and Stage Association's Bernadette Del Chiaro discusses the California Public Utilities Commission's pending decision on net metering and her view that granting utilities' request to ratchet back net metering compensation is a threat to the vibrant growth California has experienced recently in solar-plus-storage adoption. She describes the CPUC's pending pr...

Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., is undoubtedly the only member of Congress ever who has run an energy company with a business model built around energy efficiency. Here he talks about how being an advocate of pro-competitive reforms in the electric industry is "the absolute loneliest position in Washington." Support the show

Researchers Matthew Kahn and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, respectively an economist and electrical engineer at the University of Southern California, discuss their recent commentary calling for greater dynamic pricing in the electric industry. By reducing peak electricity demand, more responsive demand can eliminate the need for new fossil-fuel power plants and help reduce climate-altering and other ha...

Diana Moss, an economist and president of the American Antitrust Institute, says the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission appears to be stepping back from the bipartisan pro-competition policies that have defined FERC's approach to regulation of the electricity and natural gas industries for the last 30 years. FERC's electricity transmission rulemaking would cement monopoly control of gr...

LS Power Senior Vice President Sharon Segner discusses the multibillion-dollar stakes involved in the arcane dispute before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over ROFR, or right of first refusal.  FERC has proposed to allow incumbent monopoly utilities first crack at building the vast new network of transmission lines that must be constructed in order to transition to a clean-energy grid an...

Sunnova CEO and founder John Berger details his company's microgrid business strategy and calls for policy makers to level the playing field between competitive providers and monopoly utilities, both in front of and behind the meter. Monopoly regulation is a "socialistic and communistic business model," he says, noting that "the current system is broken financially and doesn&ap...

Pete Quist, Deputy Research Director with Open Secrets, a nonprofit dedicated to shining a spotlight on the role of money in politics, discusses the ways utilities employ money in politics and regulation. The spending is often to preserve their monopoly protection, to protect shareholder interests at the expense of consumers, and to thwart market entry by cheaper and cleaner forms of energy needed...

David Pomerantz of the Energy and Policy Institute and Jean Su of the Center for Biological Diversity explain the impetus behind a recent petition in which hundreds of public interest groups and other entities asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the monopoly electric utility industry and its efforts to preserve and enhance their monopoly status and stymy market entry by competitors a...