The Energy Markets Podcast

Dena Wiggins, president and CEO of the Natural Gas Supply Association, which includes the Center for LNG, urges policymakers to recognize that "markets are working" and rejects export bans and price controls as an answer to the energy crunch consumers face today. "Markets do work," Wiggins says. "We really believe in the operation of a market. And rather than having a regulator or a commissioner or policymaker pick winners and losers, we think that a price on carbon would give the right incentive" for investment necessary for the transition to a clean energy future.Wiggins calls for greater support from the Biden Administration and FERC for natural gas infrastructure development, and rejects the idea that development of infrastructure for natural gas, a fossil fuel, should be discouraged. "We have long been in favor of a cleaner energy future, supporting a cleaner energy future, and we think natural gas is an important part of that," Wiggins says. The NGSA chief and energy lawyer offers her first impressions on the landmark Supreme Court decision in West Virginia et al. v. EPA, which she calls "one of the blockbuster opinions from this term in the court."Support the show

At Harvard Law School's Electricity Law Initiative, Ari Peskoe works to promote market entry for clean energy, parsing through an arcane world of obsolete federal and state laws, most of which is up to a century old and even older and was not written with our current electricity needs in mind. Peskoe says he prefers the competitive market model to the monopoly utility approach to regulating electricity because it poses greater opportunities for the kind of innovation we need to decarbonize our electricity system in response to the ongoing climate crisis. It is in this vein that he worries that FERC's proposal to allow utilities the first right to build necessary power grid expansion projects might lead to gold-plating the grid, rather than the least-cost solutions for electricity consumers. Nevertheless, he is optimistic that FERC's transmission NOPR can bring state and federal regulators together to work collaboratively to build out necessary power grid architecture. He is quite critical of merchant generators in New England, whom he accuses of acting anti-competitively by working to block a Massachusetts initiative to bring state-subsidized clean Canadian hydropower into the regional wholesale power market. "What these generators want is essentially a market just for merchant generators," Peskoe says. Support the show

Maggie Shober is a utility analyst and clean-energy advocate with the Southeast Alliance for Clean Energy. She spends a great deal of her time working the IRP processes state-by-state for the various large utilities in the region, such as Duke, Florida Power & Light,  Southern Co. and the Tennessee Valley Authority, to ensure that utility planning embraces clean-energy resources and other measures to limit carbon emissions and costs for consumers. But she clearly would prefer to see a FERC-regulated competitive wholesale power market in the region, which she believes would better allow integration of renewable energy resources by utilities in the Southeast. However, Shober notes, "There are very large, very powerful utilities in the region that are absolutely against it. And so it's going to be either somehow getting them on board, or dragging them kicking and screaming into a market." But she does see a glimmer of hope in the Carolinas, where policy makers are increasingly considering RTO development in the wake of billion-dollar boondoggles involving aborted nuclear power plant development efforts and coal ash disposal problems that have contributed to escalating electricity costs for consumers. "Where we've seen some of the biggest utility boondoggles in the region is where we've had movement on this," Shober observes. Developments at TVA are another arena in the Southeast where progress could be made toward lessening utilities' monopoly control over captive ratepayers. The city of Memphis, which operates one of the largest municipally owned utility systems in the country, is expected to make a decision by year's end whether to exit the TVA system in order to obtain cleaner and less-expensive electricity in the competitive market. Still, she is a realist, noting how TVA has been "politically protected" by "pretty powerful senators" in Congress. Support the show

Court Rich, an attorney representing solar developers and others before the Arizona Corporation Commission, recounts how the state's 20-year-old law promoting retail competition in electricity was thwarted for years by the state's utilities and then, recently, ultimately repealed after an army of more than a hundred lobbyists descended on the Legislature. The bill, through some sleight-of-hand rewriting of the governing statute, was then touted by the utilities as being a consumer-protection law, in what he calls an exercise of "pure political power from the monopolies." Interestingly, he says public exposure of  Dark Money groups and the utilities' influence at the Corporation Commission has actually led to a diminution of the industry's clout with individual state regulators. That has "handcuffed them a little bit," Rich says. But the recent legislative battle, in which lawmakers ordinarily supportive of those in a diverse coalition opposing the bill changed their votes in the face of intense lobbying from utilities, shows utilities' influence with lawmakers, while somewhat diminished, was still ultimately effective.Support the show

Jason Stanek, chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission, talks about competitive retail power markets,  the commission's recent decision to allow supplier consolidated billing, the treatment of state-subsidized resources in FERC-regulated wholesale power markets, and Maryland state policies to address the climate-change threat by rate-basing  offshore wind, battery storage and EV battery charging stations.Support the show

Joy Ditto, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association, discusses her member utilities' efforts to transition to a clean-energy grid within the traditional vertically integrated utility construct. She provides a mixed view of the benefits APPA-member utilities have enjoyed as a result of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's open-access wholesale power market regime, and calls for passage of federal legislation to provide non-profit utilizes, like municipal utilities and rural co-ops, the same sort of federal subsidy that for-profit utilities and others derive for implementing renewable wind and solar energy technologies.Support the show

Pat Wood III was at the forefront of important pro-consumer electricity policy changes 20 years ago as the former chairman of both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Public Utility Commission of Texas. While his pro-competition agenda at FERC was stymied by political blowback, the past 20 years have shown the wisdom of pro-competition policies in electricity, he says, calling for current regulators to just "rip off the band-aid" and get to a competitive market model in the public interest. Today, he is once again at the forefront of change in the electricity industry as he, in his role as CEO of the Hunt Energy Network and President of Hunt Power, is betting big on the future of energy storage, building hundreds of megawatts of battery storage capacity in Texas.Support the show

Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum sees competitive markets and traditional vertically integrated monopoly utilities as equally capable of delivering pro-consumer results in the transition to a clean-energy grid and economy. But both need better oversight in order to deliver on that promise, he says. Slocum calls for greater diversity of stakeholder representation in the competitive regional wholesale power markets, and is enthusiastic about FERC's recent move to establish an office of public participation. That office is making moves to provide financial support to groups like Public Citizen to better enable broader participation in Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proceedings. Slocum will look to leverage that opportunity to ensure that the buildout of transmission to enable a green grid transformation doesn't unnecessarily impose costs on consumers. Support the show

Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, an international trade group advocating for transmission development in North America, discusses the broad and systematic difficulties in getting necessary long-distance transmission lines sited and built. He shares his views on ongoing developments before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy and in Congress that aim to address the many issues that cause transmission line siting to take frustratingly long years to complete - assuming that one of the several states involved doesn't veto the project along the way. This infrastructure must be built if the U.S. is to meet its decarbonization goals for the electric grid, he says. The WIRES official speaks to his view that competitive processes to get transmission built haven't worked thus far, while holding out the prospect that down the road, perhaps after a pilot project irons out the kinks in the process, competitive transmission development could become viable for developing long-distance, multi-state transmission lines. A recent Senate hearing where committee members were overtly hostile to FERC's recent natural gas pipeline policy statement, which addressed climate change considerations under the National Environmental Policy Act, was a "poster child" for the sort of blowback the commission's pending transmission policy statement could run into without near unanimous agreement on the controversial issues, he observed.Support the show

Phil Moeller, , Executive Vice President, Business, Operations Group and Regulatory Affairs at the Edison Electric Institute, discusses net energy metering, infrastructure development and FERC's docket on updating its transmission policy, including ROFR, whether utilities should be the sole source of electricity for EV charging in monopoly-regulated states, the threat of cyber attacks on the electric system, particularly in the wake of Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine, and competitive regional wholesale power market development.He also addresses the role that plentiful, cheap natural gas has played in keeping electricity prices stable for the last decade, and the lack of policy emphasis on the need for better coordination between the natural gas and electric sectors as part of our transition to a clean-energy economy, a problem Winter Storm Uri demonstrated tragically last year. The need for natural gas resources will only become more acute as we introduce more and more intermittent renewable resources onto the grid, he says.Support the show