Publications

This journal article summarizes the first empirical study of how major rules, as defined under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), fare in federal court. The study covers each of the 1,870 major rules issued from the CRA’s enactment in 1996 through the end of the Trump Administration. The roughly 24-year period covering four administrations (two from each party) is the longest continuous timespan of any empirical study of agency win rates.

This paper employs an economics-engineering model to simulate the impact of various electric tariff structures and rate levels on the charging economics of six hypothetical medium- and heavy-duty vehicle fleets, including their total bills and peak demand without managed charging as well as their opportunity to save money and lower their peak demand by managing their charging.

Integrating potential climate action into regulatory analyses is critical for accurately evaluating energy and environmental policies. This paper explores its impact through the federal offshore oil and gas leasing program.

Carbon dioxide removal often spurs concerns about equity and justice. At the same time, many analysts believe carbon dioxide removal is necessary to achieve United Nations temperature targets and thereby help address broader equity concerns about impacts from climate change. We conducted two recent expert-elicitation surveys that shed light on these issues. 

Coordinated planning of generation, storage, and transmission more accurately captures the interactions among these three capacity types necessary to meet electricity demand, at least in theory. However, in practice, U.S. system operators typically follow a sequential planning approach: They first determine future generation and storage additions based on an assumed unconstrained ('copper plate') system. Next, they perform dispatch simulations of this projected generation and storage capacity mix on the existing transmission grid to identify transmission constraint violations. These violations indicate the need for transmission upgrades. We describe a multistage, multilocational planning model that co-optimizes generation, storage, and transmission investments.