In the News

The growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar, raises significant distributional justice and equity concerns about who has access to DERs and their benefits. DER compensation is critical to incentivize widespread adoption. However, traditional tariff design approaches suffer from the assumption that economic efficiency and equity must necessarily trade-off. Our paper describes a comprehensive tariff design framework that incorporates both economic efficiency and equity objectives to determine electricity tariffs. We offer recommendations on how efficient tariffs can be designed without sacrificing equity, and the role of spatio-temporal granularity in tariff structures to achieve equity.

To prevent power outages like those that occurred during Winter Storm Uri, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) is considering a fundamental overhaul of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s (ERCOT) wholesale electricity market. We urge the PUCT to consider whether incentivizing more generation is needed or whether the key issue is enhancing the resilience of existing generation to extreme weather events. We then explain why any new reliability mechanism should compensate both dispatchable and non-dispatchable resources according to their reliability value, include an efficient penalty structure for non-performance of generation units, reduce uncertainty for market participants, and mitigate the exercise of market power.

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law examined the question, “How Do We Know if Hydrogen is Clean?” and noted that "the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act includes “major incentives for ‘clean’ hydrogen. Now agencies need to decide what counts as clean.” The institute gave the Department of Energy, which is charged with developing a standard for clean hydrogen, a series of recommendations.

FERC's Willie Phillips joined the Institute for Policy Integrity to discuss a shifting U.S. energy landscape and how FERC is aiding the clean power transition.

FERC’s latest decision “should be the final nail in the MOPR’s coffin,” Sarah Ladin, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said in a statement Friday. “By rejecting the request to expand NYISO’s previous rule to the rest of the state, the commission closes a chapter on overly expansive rules that undermine state authority and harm wholesale market competition.”

The IRA may reduce any real or perceived tension between wholesale markets and state policies and the need for other mechanisms to harmonize wholesale markets and state policies.

Dr. Burçin Ünel, the Energy Policy Director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, joined three other panelists to discuss why the current pricing system doesn’t work and explore ways regulators and utilities can reimagine electricity tariff structures to better price DERs and encourage more efficient electricity use.

The growing threat of power outages fueled by extreme weather calls for new approaches to grid oversight, the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said yesterday, adding that utilities and grid operators should “think differently.” Sarah Ladin, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, said FERC should “deeply scrutinize” the emissions estimates provided by project applicants, even in cases where a new gas project would replace a higher-emitting coal power plant. In general, many coal plants across the United States are closing due to market changes, she added.

FERC on Thursday proposed changing transmission planning and cost allocation processes in the first in what may be a series of initiatives to help build out the grid in response to electrification and the shift to renewable generation. Sarah Ladin, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the proposal was “a modest but important step toward more efficient planning that can facilitate decarbonization.”

Considering additional information about interactions with climate change means that some reactors’ licenses might not be extended. But this reversal supports the viability and social license of the U.S.’s nuclear fleet, thereby helping to preserve a crucial zero-emissions resource for the power sector.