Publications

This policy brief highlights Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provisions that are relevant to transmission siting, summarizes the changes they effectuate, and describes important implications of those changes for efforts to develop more interstate transmission capacity. It then offers a brief assessment of the IIJA’s overarching significance to such efforts, including by comparing them to a more ambitious legislative alternative.

In the absence of legislation, critical long-distance transmission can be developed by applying existing federal legal authorities. A number of important regulatory and commercial measures have been proposed, including streamlining transmission planning, upgrading existing transmission system components, putting transmission lines underground, and using existing rights-of-way from highways and railroads. Even if these solutions are adopted, however, state siting requirements may prove an important obstacle to developing an efficient, national transmission grid. So, this paper examines legal authorities already available to the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to develop the interstate transmission capacity crucial to the energy transition.

The typical starting point and centerpiece of energy decarbonization is the electric power sector, a large direct GHG emitter. Published in The Electricity Journal, this paper explores what the modeling community should do to inform this transition, including expanding energy market datasets and designing models that incorporate multiple objectives and manifold actors behaving strategically in a framework consisting of large uncertainty, while accounting for the physics of power systems.

The February 2021 blackout in Texas underscored the importance of reliable and resilient power systems. This article discusses the roles of regulators, markets, fuel and generation supply chains, and interdependent infrastructures, and finds that they need to be reconsidered and redefined to successfully meet the future challenges of increased electrification and severe weather

While academic research on Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) has been mostly focused on first-best systems, we hypothesize that in reality multiple information barriers to efficient DER roll-out exist. We thus study the prevalence and importance of information issues arising in the context of deployment of DERs by reviewing the existing engineering and economic literature on distributed resources, analyzing DER-related regulatory proceedings, and surveying the relevant electricity sector stakeholders for their perception of information relevance and accessibility.