The Energy Markets Podcast

Tyson Slocum has headed Public Citizen's energy program since the turn of the century. Today he is working to ensure the rapid industry disruption from an anticipated massive increase in electricity demand from AI data center development does not impose stranded costs on consumers.

"The microprocessing needs for a data center are extraordinarily energy intensive. To run millions and millions of microprocessors, to generate and store, particularly artificial intelligence platforms and agents, requires enormous amounts of electric power. And the grid and our systems to sort of build out infrastructure were not really designed for this type...

PJM Interconnection, the nation's largest competitive wholesale power market, has been swept up in the maelstrom of the public and political fallout that's emerged in the wake of surging prices in its capacity market, which reflect a sharp increase in demand because of greater electrification and data center growth. With electricity prices a key part of the affordability crisis Americans are experiencing, PJM is working to ensure there is enough generation capacity on its system to meet data center growth and surging demand for electricity, says former Pennsylvania PUC chair Glen Thomas, who heads the PJM Power Providers group...

Diana Moss, an economist and Director of Competition Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, advocates applying antitrust policy throughout the economy for the benefit of consumers. The former FERC economist and former president of the American Antitrust Institute warns that remonopolization of the energy industry, along with the greater consolidation throughout the economy the result of regulators stepping back from antitrust enforcement, is contributing to the "epic cost of living crisis" that's become a major political issue for the midterms.

"Consumers are left completely on the side of the road in terms of being protected because that's...

Dan Becker has been a decades-long advocate for policies addressing the climate disruption that is occurring because of the accumulation of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, first at the Sierra Club and today with the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign.

Becker says a decades-long misinformation campaign that he attributes to oil and auto industry interests is responsible for the legions today who question the fact-based science and agree with the president that climate change is a "hoax."

The industry interests long understood that climate "was not necessarily very good for their...

Elisa Wood, founder and editor of the newsletter Energy Changemakers, has covered the evolution of consumer-empowering technologies such as microgrids, demand response, rooftop solar and battery storage and vehicle-to-grid for more than a dozen years. There is perhaps no one more qualified to discuss these emerging consumer-empowering electricity options and the forces working against their adoption.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Wood notes the headwinds facing these technologies but is overall optimistic about the future. The traditional regulatory framework for monopoly utilities, a vestige of the 19th century, rewards utilities for building big projects that provide shareholders big...

John Farrell, director of ILSR's Energy Democracy Initiative, sees municipal ownership of utilities as an answer to the abuses consumers suffer at the hands of investor-owned monopoly utility companies. But he also sees competitive markets as enabling the sorts of local self-reliance his organization promotes.

"I think the lesson we've seen from the way that we regulate monopoly for-profit utilities is that we need a lot more discipline from competition because our belief that regulation would mimic competition, which is how it's supposed to work, that's the theory behind it, is that it's not working at all,"...

The U.S. nuclear industry is enjoying a robust turnaround, largely driven by interest in emerging new nuclear technologies, such as small modular reactors. Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, talks about the many different innovative technologies developers are pursuing, the administration's strong support both new and traditional nuclear technology and her NGO's efforts to reform burdensome and costly Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing and oversight requirements. 

Amid all the rush of developments in new nuclear, the alliance looks forward to a time when new nuclear, like, what happened with variable renewables "will be a...

Despite increasingly catastrophic weather events occurring across the globe, climate change expert Paul Bledsoe is optimistic there is still time to ward off the worst of climate disruption caused by emissions of greenshouse gases, but time is running out. And he sees reducing what he calls "super pollutants," such as methane and HFCs, rather than simply reducing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, as offering the most efficient appraoch to stemming the worst of the worst when it comes to climate disruption.

"If we can just over the next 20 years reduce these super pollutants, begin to reduce CO2...

The data industry is in a land rush to develop new data centers to meet projected demand due to artificial intelligence. Rapidly bringing many new, large data centers online translates into a sharp increase in demand for electricity at a time when consumers and politicians are concerned about rising electricity prices. At the same time, communities and their political representatives are increasingly working to block the siting of data centers in their communities.

The industry is attempting to meet "unprecedented demand for the services that are powered by data centers" as the amount of computing time and...

William S. Becker, the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former Department of Energy official, discusses the fossil fuel industry "cartel" that has aligned itself with congressional Republicans and the Trump administration to frustrate concerted policies in response to the threat from climate disruption.

"It's a huge industry. It's got a tremendous sunk investment," Becker observes. "It's been around for 200 years. It's fighting to keep access to something on the order of, well, tens of trillions of dollars of fossil fuels that are still underground. Science is saying that about two thirds of...

The Insurance Information Institute's Chief Economist, Michel Leonard, discusses how the insurance industry is contending with increasingly intense and more frequent extreme weather events that are driving up insurance costs for consumers. While there are a number of factors driving cost increases for insurance, such as inflation, there's no doubt that extreme events driven by human-caused climate disruption is a principal factor, Leonard says.

Climate is the one of most critical issues affecting the insurance industry, he says. "It's the make or break of our industry."

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Energy Markets Podcast host Bryan Lee explains why he has returned to publishing regular episodes of the podcast after a two-year sabbatical. "I feel compelled to return," Lee says, citing "the looming threat of a retreat from electricity regulatory reforms that have provided billions of dollars in benefits to consumers."

Lee also draws on his long career in energy and environmental policy to provide the history of competitive reforms over the past 30 years intended to replace monopoly regulation of electricity prices with market-based pricing. 

"While the decades-old model for competitive electricity markets needs to be i...

In this episode we continue our consideration of what Bill Massey in our first episode this season called "the battle of the statistics" between monopoly and competition advocates. We talk with Michael Giberson, an economist and senior fellow for energy with the R Street Institute, who notes the importance of taking statistics into proper context when attempting to contrast between monopoly utility regulation and competitive markets – particularly the need to account for the impact of inflation when looking at changes in electricity prices over time.

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Since the dawn of retail energy competition a quarter century ago, various factions pro and con have engaged in a "battle of the statistics" (as former FERC Commissioner Bill Massey termed it in Episode 1 of this season) regarding the benefits that consumers – particularly residential customers – obtain from competition in retail electricity service. Mostly, these statistical arguments have centered around price savings that residential consumers may or may not have obtained from having a competitive choice in energy suppliers.

In this episode, we hear from Constellation Energy's Rich Spilky, who on behalf of the Retail Energy Supply Association brea...

The Biden administration in January announced a pause in reviewing export permits for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in order to better understand the impacts that the United States' world-leading LNG exports will have on domestic natural gas prices, climate change, and environmental equity. Could the pause threaten the U.S.'s position as the world's top LNG supplier? 

Charlie Riedl, executive director of the Center for LNG, speaks to the the national security implications of the administration's pause – U.S. LNG was instrumental in Europe's pivot away from Russian gas in the wake of the Ukraine invasion – and s...

The debate over the benefits of competition for energy consumers has persisted since the advent of retail competition for electricity and natural gas more than two decades ago. Consumers are stuck in a limbo between traditional monopoly regulation and competitive choice because the movement to deregulate energy pricing (much as most other formerly price-regulated industries were deregulated decades ago) has stalled in the wake of the catastrophic collapse of California's disastrously ill-designed market at the turn of the century.

Ever since, competition advocates have sought to expand the dozen or more states where competitive energy supply is...

Our discussion continues with David Doniger, Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney, who notes that flexible market-based emissions cap-and-trade programs have been applied somewhat ubiquitously to address a range of environmental issues, from eliminating lead in gasoline, to combatting acid rain, to phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals – even to allocating catch limits for herring, an issue incidentally connected to cases now pending before the Supreme Court challenging the long-standing legal precedent known as the Chevron doctrine.

But Congress and the Supreme Court have rejected attempts to apply this flexible market-based approach to controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Today, few in...

Who better to discuss the ramifications of the Supreme Court's apparent path toward striking down the long-standing legal precedent known as the Chevron doctrine than the lawyer who argued the original case 40 years ago?

Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney David Doniger is a lion of the environmental movement who has been instrumental in the environmental group's efforts to rein in air pollution from fossil fuels and emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals. He has been a fixture at the NRDC since 1978, except for the years during the Clinton administration when he played key environmental roles at both the...

Energy lawyer and law school professor William Massey, at 10 years the longest-serving commissioner ever at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, discusses the vast body of legal precedent finding FERC has expansive authority under the Federal Power Act and Natural Gas Act, and reviews pending cases before the Supreme Court that may test whether this expansive view of FERC's authority will continue under the court's new Major Questions Doctrine.

"The courts have said FERC’s authority is at its zenith when it comes to remedying undue discrimination. And FERC has remembered that and bases many of its policy ch...

The world's burgeoning billions have been kept fed thanks to the "Green Revolution" of the 20th century, which featured new hybridized crops with enhanced yields. Often deemed a miracle of science, it was also made possible by energy-intensive industrial fertilizers. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were each awarded the Nobel Prize for their contributions to the widely used processes for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen taken from ambient air and hydrogen derived from fossil fuels. These ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizers, along with mined fertilizers, today help to feed the world, something Thomas Robert Malthus never envisioned in his 18th century writings...

Matthew Hunter was a power trader in the Western market in 2000, when California's poorly designed and managed electricity market imploded costing consumers hundreds of millions of dollars. After that, he spent much of his career at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. He gives us a deep dive into hedging – futures markets, derivatives and swaps – and how these complex price-risk mechanisms don't necessarily protect consumers in the end.

A leading reason that California's market failed so spectacularly was because state law prohibited the state's Big Three utilities from hedging their price risk. At t...

State Senator Tom Davis of South Carolina is a rare breed in politics today. At a time when no other state is actively considering competitive reforms to their traditionally monopoly-regulated utility sectors, and many politicians in states already benefiting from competition in electricity are promoting anticompetitive measures, he is leading the push for his state's consumers and economy to benefit from greater customer choice and competition among electricity providers. 

The Republican lawmaker discusses how the multibillion-dollar V.C. Summer nuclear debacle in South Carolina in 2017 jolted him and other Palmetto state lawmakers to take a deep dive i...

More than two decades ago when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sought to put large regional wholesale power markets in place nationally, Western states were a hotbed of opposition to the since-abandoned goal.  But today there are two competing proposals for competitive day-ahead wholesale power markets as the region has come to recognize that market-based regionalization helps cost-effectively and reliably integrate increasing amounts of variable renewable energy resources.

The Western Power Trading Forum's Scott Miller breaks those down for us, and explains why he's optimistic that the two nascent efforts under way today will one day result i...

UK-based Octopus Energy has seen extraordinary growth since launched in 2015 by fund-management firm Octopus Group. It's heavily invested in renewable energy in the UK and elsewhere, and it has retail energy supply operations in Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan and New Zealand, with its U.S. arm headquartered in Houston. As its name would suggest, Octopus has its tentacles everywhere all at once in competitive energy supply, it would seem. And that reach promises to extend even further with the company's Kraken software platform, which it doesn't keep to itself but licenses to other retail energy providers.

The...

Electric utility monopolies have captured headlines in recent years by sparking catastrophic wildfires and fomenting public corruption scandals in several states. "There are probably other things like this going on we just haven't found out about," remarks John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. We spoke with him about his recent article in the American Prospect, How private monopolies fuel climate disaster and public corruption. 

Farrell speaks to how the investor-owned utility's interests in earning a return for its shareholders typically don't align with the interests of its customers or t...

The flood of financial headlines on the offshore wind industry have been quite bearish in recent months. The industry has been buffetted by strong post-COVID headwinds – dramatic inflationary pressures and supply chain problems – that have rendered several Atlantic coast projects uneconomic. After writing down its assets by $2.3 billion, Orsted's stock has been punished by the market as the company threatens to walk away from uneconomic projects unless their terms can be renegotiated to reflect changed economic circumstances. Offering another barometer of the deep bear market for offshore wind were recent lease auctions in the U.S. and UK, which rece...

The Environmental Protection Agency's new proposed rules to significantly crack down on carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, as published, promises to aggravate growing power grid reliability concerns, EPSA president and CEO Todd Snitchler suggests.  "I think we need to be thinking a little more holistically and not siloed in the rules in order for us to make sure that we can achieve the outcomes that policymakers want us to achieve, while still ensuring system reliability. That has to be first and foremost," Snitchler says.

More broadly on grid-reliability concerns, Snitchler rejects assertions by some that c...

Commissioner Mark Christie of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been a prominent advocate of the need to overhaul the competitive market design at the heart of the regional wholesale power markets that have evolved in the U.S. over the past 25 years ("It's time to reconsider single-clearing price mechanisms in U.S. energy markets", Energy Law Journal, May 2, 2023).

The fossil fuel-fired "dispatchable" generation units that Christie sees as crucial to ensuring power grid reliability are retiring faster than passively fueled renewable energy resources can be brought on to replace them. In our discussion, Commissioner Christie makes...

Massachusetts is actively considering Gov. Maura Healey's longstanding demand to end competitive retail energy sales to residential customers. As part of this debate in Massachusetts and elsewhere, the Retail Energy Advancement League commissioned the Analysis Group's Paul Hibbard, a former Massachusetts utility regulator,  to provide a comprehensive examination of retail energy choice. We talk with the report's author as well as Chris Ercoli, REAL's president and CEO.

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There's something like a couple dozen proposals now for development of small modular reactors (SMRs), widely seen as the future of nuclear power as a participant in the clean-energy transition. Publicly traded NuScale* is at the vanguard of this trend. We spoke with the Nuclear Energy Institute's Matt Crozat about the prospects for SMRs and nuclear's role in the clean-energy transition at a time when we thought the first of Georgia Power's new Vogtle nuclear power units would have already been brought online. But a "degraded hydrogen seal" was only the latest delay for the $35 billion expansion project funded...

Burned by an aborted nuclear power plant new build that saddled the state's consumers with hundreds of millions of dollars in needless costs for years to come, South Carolina's Act 187 established a legislative study committee to ponder whether the state's electricity consumers might not be better off with competitive reforms of the Palmetto State's 150-year-old monopoly regulatory regime. A centerpiece of the committee's considerations is a sweeping analysis of the competitive options the state could pursue, comprehensively put together by the Brattle Group. 

We talk with two of the report's authors – John Tsoukalis, principal, and Andrew Levitt, sen...

Grid Strategy's Rob Gramlich and Electric Advisors Consulting's Frank Lacey detail the findings of a policy analysis paper they co-authored, Serving Customers Best: The Benefits of Competitive Electric Vehicle Charging Stations.* We also talk with Doug Kantor, general counsel for NACS, the international association for the convenience store industry, which sponsored the policy analysis.

The analysis found EV charging customers will be served best if utilities are not permitted to extend their monopoly into the nascent retail EV charging business. Yet utility regulators in states across the country are already ordering utility investments in public EV charging...

Texas lawmakers just concluded their 88th biennial legislative session in Austin, and energy issues were very much at the fore as a range of proposals that would have incentivized investment in gas-fired generation and disincentivized renewables were hotly contested. 

The R Street Institute's Josiah Neeley discusses the energy-related aspects of the session, which he said could have turned out much worse for consumers than it did. Many of the pro-gas, anti-renewable measures proposed in the Senate were rejected by the House, while others resulted in compromises that minimized the harm to electricity consumers.

"I would s...

We reached out to ITC Holdings Corp. for the transmission owner's view on monopoly transmission development and the incumbent transmission owner's right of first refusal, known by the acronym ROFR, to build new interregional transmission grid projects.

The issue has come to the fore as the federal government plans to undertake a massive buildout of the U.S. transmission network, and separately as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has proposed, in an as-yet unfinalized rulemaking, to partially reinstate ROFR for interregional transmission projects in hopes of sparking more much-needed transmission development.

The competitive selection process...

Back in the 1990s, the University of Delaware's Willett Kempton conducted early vehicle-to-grid (V2G) experiments with PJM, operator of the MidAtlantic region's wholesale power market, testing the feasibility of using electric vehicles to provide regulation services to the grid. In this episode, Kempton speaks to the progress that's been made in the intervening decades to set the stage for today's electricity market, where EVs are just beginning to have enough market penetration to provide enough battery storage at scale to make bidirectional electricity flows between vehicles and the grid a reality – and an important reliability tool for grid op...

Rich Glick, in his first wide-ranging interview since denied a second term at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, discusses the need for building out the transmission grid and for reforms to wholesale power markets to better accommodate the evolving resource mix toward more renewable, intermittent resources. Competitive wholesale power market reforms also are needed to address increasing climate-induced stresses on reliability, the former FERC chairman said.

"I think that some of the markets around the country, the markets operated by the RTOs and ISOs around the country, certainly need to...

William Hogan, the Raymond Plank Research Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, along with his colleague Scott Harvey, are the architects of the market structure employed in every competitive regional wholesale power market in the United States, known as the bid-based, security constrained economic dispatch model with locational marginal prices.

This market model has been the subject of criticisms from its inception some three decades ago,  but in recent years it has come under renewed attack from interests who claim it is inadequate to support a transition to a clean-energy grid comprised o...

MIT economist Tim Schittekatte (tsgee-teh-kah-tuh) details his recent working paper, Electricity Rate Design in a Decarbonizing Economy: An analysis of time-of-use and critical peak pricing. Two of his co-authors are lions of energy economics, MIT economists Paul Joskow and Richard Schmalensee. The paper finds that a combination of time-of-use (TOU) and critical peak pricing (CPP) at retail can approximate the price signals electricity consumers would otherwise get from the competitive wholesale power markets.

Twenty years ago, price-responsive demand was supposed to be a major benefit of electricity restructuring at retail. But beyond the more sophisticated commercial and...

More than ten years ago, Dominion Energy convinced Virginia lawmakers to clip the wings of the state's utility regulator, the State Corporation Commission. After a decade in which Virginia Power overcollected on its rates as an unregulated monopoly, the Legislature in Richmond had finally had enough and passed legislation restoring the SCC's utility ratemaking authority. 

In this episode, Brennan Gilmore, executive director of the advocacy group Clean Virginia, discusses this lost decade when Dominion obtained virtually everything it wanted in Richmond and overcollected in rates nearly $2 billion, and details the efforts of his group and a vast c...

Jason Stanek, the lame duck chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission, is riding out the remainder of his term in office with a "maximum enforcement" campaign to crack down on retail suppliers "that engage in deceit, confusion, and trickery in order to close the deal." January saw the second-highest number of consumer complaints received, and February is shaping up to set a record for the month, he said, promising the PSC will use "expedited procedures to, if necessary, eject suppliers from the market."

He discusses how he's lost faith in retail competition in electricity. "I am...