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March 20, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms V
In this RTO series, I’ve been exploring the decision-making processes and corporate governance structures within Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), highlighting how these institutions perpetuate the control and decision-making power of incumbent investor-owned utilities (IOUs). Today, we’ll delve deeper by examining two critical, complementary insights: first, how monopoly regulation dilutes corporate governance incentives for IOUs, and…
February 27, 2025
Innovating Future Power Systems: From Vision to Action
The electricity sector is at an inflection point. The historical model of centralized, monopoly-provided electric service is under pressure from technological change, shifting market forces, evolving policy objectives, and changing consumer expectations. This transformation is accelerating. One fundamental question looms: how can power systems evolve to balance desired outcomes like reliability, resilience, affordability, and decarbonization…
February 21, 2025
Innovating Future Power Systems: From Vision to Action
Key Points Read the full report here.
February 19, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms IV
Networks shape modern life. From roads to the internet to global supply chains, they enable movement, exchange, and value creation. But networks also suffer from congestion, a problem driven by both physical limitations and the difficulty of defining and enforcing property rights. In some networks, pricing mechanisms can help mitigate congestion, but political and regulatory…
January 31, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms III
As a follow-on to my previous two posts on regional transmission organizations (RTOs) in electricity, I was heading in a direction that relies on you, dear reader, having a foundational understanding of the investor-owned utilities (IOUs) that are the transmission owners (TOs) in RTOs. Many of you do, but lots don’t, especially tech folks who…
January 24, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms II
Whether it’s rising electricity bills, reliability concerns, an impetus for decarbonization, or the related importance of grid modernization, power systems in the U.S. and around the world are struggling with change. In this series on regional transmission organizations (RTOs), I’m digging in to the institutional aspects of these challenges. Last time I started with history….
December 17, 2024
Economics of Grid Defection II
Last week I wrote about the grid defection discussion circa 2014, motivated by Elisa Wood’s webinar with Seyyed Ali Sadat and Joshua Pearce of Western Ontario University on their new paper in Solar Energy. Let’s pick up the story from 2014 and discuss the research leading up to their paper. Evolution of the Research In the ensuing…
December 12, 2024
Economics of Grid Defection I
Yesterday Elisa Wood hosted a webinar with Seyyed Ali Sadat and Joshua Pearce of Western Ontario University, who have a new paper: The threat of economic grid defection in the US with solar photovoltaic, battery and generator hybrid systems(Solar Energy, November 2024). Grid defection occurs when electricity customers generate and store enough power locally to become fully self-sufficient…
December 6, 2024
Recombinant Modularity and Technological Change
In the past couple of weeks I’ve read two things I want to recommend that are actually deeply related. The first is Brian Potter’s excellent history of technology analysis of the evolution of the lithium ion battery. Brian’s Construction Physics newsletter is a consistently excellent treasure trove of analysis, from his series on the history of the electricity…
November 7, 2024
History of Technology: Cheaper, Cleaner, Easier
Every fall since 2020 I have been teaching energy economics in Northwestern University’s Master of Science in Energy and Sustainability (MSES) program. I team teach with my friend Mark Witte, and my part of the course is backloaded—natural monopoly theory and regulation in theory and in history, new generation technology invention and adoption, wholesale power markets, digitalization…