The phasedown of coal for electricity generation is considered vital to meeting global climate targets. Many countries have pledged to stop using coal, with some as early as 2030. While the United States has no target currently in place, several states do. In this paper, we examine the...

The U.S. regulation of high-voltage transmission is highly complex and, as a result, generally poorly understood. The complexity is created by separate, but overlapping, jurisdictional authorities of the U.S. federal regulators and those of individual states, districts, and territories. While...

Studies of the firm's demand for factor inputs often assume a constant rate of utilization of the inputs and ignore the fact that the firm can simultaneously choose the level and the rate of utilization of its inputs. In particular, the literature on dynamic factor demand models has, until...

Future electricity systems with tight constraints on carbon emissions will rely much more on wind and solar generation, with zero marginal cost, than today. We use capacity expansion modelling of Texas in 2050 to illustrate wholesale price distributions in future energy-only, carbon-constrained...

This paper examines vertical arrangements in electricity markets. Vertically integrated wholesalers, or those with long-term contracts, have less incentive to raise wholesale prices when retail prices are determined beforehand. For three restructured markets, we simulate prices that define...

While neoclassical models assume static cost-minimization by firms, agency models suggest that firms may not minimize costs in less-competitive or regulated environments. We test this using a transition from cost-of-service regulation to market-oriented environments for many U.S. electric...

We examine the real effects of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) on electric power plants in the United States. Starting in 2010, the GHGRP requires both the reporting of greenhouse gas emissions by facilities emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year to the...

Growing amounts of intermittent renewable generation capacity substantially increases the complexity of determining whether sufficient energy will be available to meet hourly demands throughout the year. As the events of August 2020 in California and February 2021 in Texas demonstrate, supply...

For the first four decades of its existence the U.S. nuclear power industry was run by regulated utilities, with most companies owning only one or two reactors. Beginning in the late 1990s electricity markets in many states were deregulated and almost half of the nation's 103 reactors were sold...

Prior to the 1990s, most electricity customers in the U.S. were served by regulated, vertically-integrated, monopoly utilities that handled electricity generation, transmission, local distribution and billing/collections. Regulators set retail electricity prices to allow the utility to recover...