The Energy Markets Podcast

Diana Moss, an economist and Director of Competition Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, advocates applying antitrust policy throughout the economy for the benefit of consumers. The former FERC economist and former president of the American Antitrust Institute warns that remonopolization of the energy industry, along with the greater consolidation throughout the economy the result of regul...

Dan Becker has been a decades-long advocate for policies addressing the climate disruption that is occurring because of the accumulation of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, first at the Sierra Club and today with the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign. Becker says a decades-long misinformation campaign that he attributes to oil and auto industry inte...

Elisa Wood, founder and editor of the newsletter Energy Changemakers, has covered the evolution of consumer-empowering technologies such as microgrids, demand response, rooftop solar and battery storage and vehicle-to-grid for more than a dozen years. There is perhaps no one more qualified to discuss these emerging consumer-empowering electricity options and the forces working against their adopti...

John Farrell, director of ILSR's Energy Democracy Initiative, sees municipal ownership of utilities as an answer to the abuses consumers suffer at the hands of investor-owned monopoly utility companies. But he also sees competitive markets as enabling the sorts of local self-reliance his organization promotes. "I think the lesson we've seen from the way that we regulate monopoly for...

The U.S. nuclear industry is enjoying a robust turnaround, largely driven by interest in emerging new nuclear technologies, such as small modular reactors. Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, talks about the many different innovative technologies developers are pursuing, the administration's strong support both new and traditional nuclear technology and her N...

Despite increasingly catastrophic weather events occurring across the globe, climate change expert Paul Bledsoe is optimistic there is still time to ward off the worst of climate disruption caused by emissions of greenshouse gases, but time is running out. And he sees reducing what he calls "super pollutants," such as methane and HFCs, rather than simply reducing CO2 emissions from fossi...

The data industry is in a land rush to develop new data centers to meet projected demand due to artificial intelligence. Rapidly bringing many new, large data centers online translates into a sharp increase in demand for electricity at a time when consumers and politicians are concerned about rising electricity prices. At the same time, communities and their political representatives are increasin...

William S. Becker, the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former Department of Energy official, discusses the fossil fuel industry "cartel" that has aligned itself with congressional Republicans and the Trump administration to frustrate concerted policies in response to the threat from climate disruption. "It's a huge industry. It's got a t...

The Insurance Information Institute's Chief Economist, Michel Leonard, discusses how the insurance industry is contending with increasingly intense and more frequent extreme weather events that are driving up insurance costs for consumers. While there are a number of factors driving cost increases for insurance, such as inflation, there's no doubt that extreme events driven by human-caus...

Energy Markets Podcast host Bryan Lee explains why he has returned to publishing regular episodes of the podcast after a two-year sabbatical. "I feel compelled to return," Lee says, citing "the looming threat of a retreat from electricity regulatory reforms that have provided billions of dollars in benefits to consumers." Lee also draws on his long career in energy and environm...

In this episode we continue our consideration of what Bill Massey in our first episode this season called "the battle of the statistics" between monopoly and competition advocates. We talk with Michael Giberson, an economist and senior fellow for energy with the R Street Institute, who notes the importance of taking statistics into proper context when attempting to contrast between monop...

Since the dawn of retail energy competition a quarter century ago, various factions pro and con have engaged in a "battle of the statistics" (as former FERC Commissioner Bill Massey termed it in Episode 1 of this season) regarding the benefits that consumers – particularly residential customers – obtain from competition in retail electricity service. Mostly, these statistical arguments h...

The Biden administration in January announced a pause in reviewing export permits for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in order to better understand the impacts that the United States' world-leading LNG exports will have on domestic natural gas prices, climate change, and environmental equity. Could the pause threaten the U.S.'s position as the world's top LNG supplier?  Charlie Riedl, e...

The debate over the benefits of competition for energy consumers has persisted since the advent of retail competition for electricity and natural gas more than two decades ago. Consumers are stuck in a limbo between traditional monopoly regulation and competitive choice because the movement to deregulate energy pricing (much as most other formerly price-regulated industries were deregulated decade...

Our discussion continues with David Doniger, Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney, who notes that flexible market-based emissions cap-and-trade programs have been applied somewhat ubiquitously to address a range of environmental issues, from eliminating lead in gasoline, to combatting acid rain, to phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals – even to allocating catch limits for herring, an...

Who better to discuss the ramifications of the Supreme Court's apparent path toward striking down the long-standing legal precedent known as the Chevron doctrine than the lawyer who argued the original case 40 years ago? Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney David Doniger is a lion of the environmental movement who has been instrumental in the environmental group's efforts to...

Energy lawyer and law school professor William Massey, at 10 years the longest-serving commissioner ever at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, discusses the vast body of legal precedent finding FERC has expansive authority under the Federal Power Act and Natural Gas Act, and reviews pending cases before the Supreme Court that may test whether this expansive view of FERC's authority wil...

The world's burgeoning billions have been kept fed thanks to the "Green Revolution" of the 20th century, which featured new hybridized crops with enhanced yields. Often deemed a miracle of science, it was also made possible by energy-intensive industrial fertilizers. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were each awarded the Nobel Prize for their contributions to the widely used processes for...

Matthew Hunter was a power trader in the Western market in 2000, when California's poorly designed and managed electricity market imploded costing consumers hundreds of millions of dollars. After that, he spent much of his career at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. He gives us a deep dive into hedging – futures markets, derivatives and s...

State Senator Tom Davis of South Carolina is a rare breed in politics today. At a time when no other state is actively considering competitive reforms to their traditionally monopoly-regulated utility sectors, and many politicians in states already benefiting from competition in electricity are promoting anticompetitive measures, he is leading the push for his state's consumers and economy to...

More than two decades ago when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sought to put large regional wholesale power markets in place nationally, Western states were a hotbed of opposition to the since-abandoned goal.  But today there are two competing proposals for competitive day-ahead wholesale power markets as the region has come to recognize that market-based regionalization helps cost-effect...

UK-based Octopus Energy has seen extraordinary growth since launched in 2015 by fund-management firm Octopus Group. It's heavily invested in renewable energy in the UK and elsewhere, and it has retail energy supply operations in Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan and New Zealand, with its U.S. arm headquartered in Houston. As its name would suggest, Octopus has its tentacles everywhere all at o...

Electric utility monopolies have captured headlines in recent years by sparking catastrophic wildfires and fomenting public corruption scandals in several states. "There are probably other things like this going on we just haven't found out about," remarks John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. We spoke with him about his...

The flood of financial headlines on the offshore wind industry have been quite bearish in recent months. The industry has been buffetted by strong post-COVID headwinds – dramatic inflationary pressures and supply chain problems – that have rendered several Atlantic coast projects uneconomic. After writing down its assets by $2.3 billion, Orsted's stock has been punished by the market as the c...

The Environmental Protection Agency's new proposed rules to significantly crack down on carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, as published, promises to aggravate growing power grid reliability concerns, EPSA president and CEO Todd Snitchler suggests.  "I think we need to be thinking a little more holistically and not siloed in the rules in order for us to make sure that w...