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February 21, 2025
Innovating Future Power Systems: From Vision to Action
Key Points Read the full report here.
February 20, 2025
Innovating Future Power Systems: From Vision to Action
Key Points Executive Summary The global energy landscape is transforming, and nowhere is this more evident than the electricity sector. Technological advancements, shifting economic conditions, and evolving environmental policies are converging to reshape the way power systems operate. This report explores the implications of these changes for the future of power systems, focusing on the…
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…
February 19, 2025
Trump’s Tariffs Would Prime Prices at the Gas Pump
Donald Trump promised tariffs, and he delivered, imposing by executive fiat tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada (10 percent on Canadian energy) and Mexico and 10 percent on imports from China. His justifications are “the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl,” and our “major trade deficits with those countries.” According…
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…
February 18, 2025
Another Step Forward in NEPA Reform
America’s system of environmental reviews has been choking progress for a half-century. A key culprit: the National Environmental Policy Act, once a seemingly sensible safeguard that has metastasized into a bureaucratic quagmire that can entangle projects for years at great cost. As I write in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi…
February 10, 2025
Hits and Misses
The term “scenario” was introduced by a group of researchers at the RAND Corporation in the 1960s. Herman Kahn explained its origin in 1979: “We deliberately chose the word [scenario] to deglamorize the concept . . . There is no a priori concept that a scenario should be taken seriously or that it is intended to reflect aspects…
February 3, 2025
The Ivanpah Solar Power Monstrosity Bites the Taxpayers. Again.
It was the future. It would demonstrate how to save the planet. It would produce electricity clean and cheap and immune to the vagaries of international shifts in prices, interest rates, currency exchange values, and the caprice of foreign governments. It was a demonstration of the massive achievements possible from public/private “partnerships,” that is, central…
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 29, 2025
On the Front Porch with Brent Orrell and Tony Pipa: A Conversation with Benji Backer and Michelle Moore
Event Description The tensions between development and sustainability and production and conservation, combined with the ongoing debate over energy sources, have taken center stage in recent years. Join us for the next installment of the “On the Front Porch” series as AEI’s Brent Orrell and the Brookings Institution’s Tony Pipa talk with Michelle Moore of…