The Energy Markets Podcast

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...

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...