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...

Encouraged by the declining cost of grid-scale renewables, recent analyses conclude that the United States could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at relatively low cost using currently available technologies. While the cost of renewable generation has declined dramatically,...

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 estimates the relationship between investments in five distributed generation technologies and hourly net injections to the distribution grid for over 2,000 substations in France between 2005 and 2018. We find that investments in distributed wind and solar capacity have little or no...

Reliable estimates of the value of electricity transmission are critical if these heavily-regulated investments are to be made cost-effectively. In this paper, we exploit the abrupt closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in February 2012. During the previous decade, SONGS...

Currently, most U.S. electricity consumers pay a constant price per kWh consumed that accounts for most of their bill. Ongoing developments in the power system increase efficiency gains that can be made from exposing consumers to widely varying wholesale spot prices. Pure spot pricing is not...

Economists, energy experts, and policymakers have called for accelerating investment in the U.S. electricity transmission network. Additional transmission lines could better integrate markets, reducing the total cost of electricity generation. They could also allow for the better integration of...

Electricity restructuring has created the opportunity for producers to exercise market power. Oligopolists increase price by distorting output decisions, causing cross-firm production inefficiencies. This study estimates the environmental implications of production inefficiencies attributed to...

Restructuring electricity markets has enabled wholesalers to exercise market power. Using a common method of measuring competitive behavior in these markets, several studies have found substantial inefficiencies. This method overstates actual welfare loss by ignoring production constraints that...

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...