Publications

Vietor, Richard H.K. and Sheldahl-Thomason, Haviland, Mexico's Energy Reform." January 23, 2017. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing."

2003 Blackout

Shavel, Ira; Kline, Michael; Lueken, Roger; Ruiz, Pablo. Diversity of Reliability Attributes: A Key Component of the Modern Grid. Prepared for American Petroleum Institute by The Brattle Group, May 2017.

Hibbard, Paul; Tierney, Susan; Franklin, Katherine. Electricity Markets, Reliability and the Evolving U.S. Power System. Analysis Group, June 2017

The Climate Leadership Council's proposal for Carbon Dividends

Bushnell, James; Flagg, Michaela; Mansur, Erin. Working paper: Capacity Markets at a Crossroads. Energy Institute at Haas, April 2017.

Bushnell, James; Flagg, Michaela; Mansur, Erin. Working paper: Capacity Markets at a Crossroads. Energy Institute at Haas, April 2017.

Curran, Jennifer. "Beyond Order 1000: Seams Operations and Congestion Management." Presentation to the Harvard Electricity Policy Group's 83rd Plenary Session. Cambridge, MA, June 2, 2016. 

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission v. Electric Power Supply Association et al., Supreme Court Decision (2016).

This paper estimates changes in electricity generation costs caused by the introduction of market mechanisms to determine output decisions in service areas that were previously using command-and-control-type operations. I use the staggered transition to markets from 1999- 2012 to evaluate the causal impact of liberalization using a nationwide panel of hourly data on electricity demand and unit-level costs, capacities, and output. To address the potentially confounding effects of unrelated fuel price changes, I use machine learning methods to predict the allocation of output to generating units in the absence of markets for counterfactual pro- duction patterns. I find that markets reduce production costs by $3B per year by reallocating output among existing power plants: Gains from trade across service areas increase by 20% based on a 10% increase in traded electricity, and costs from using uneconomical units fall 20% from a 10% reduction in their operation.

Excerpt trom the Introduction:
In the past two decades, the mounting risks posed by climate change have motivated businesses, cities, states, national governments, and the international community to pledge to take action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Given the scale of the problem, the breadth of action must be effective and must set the foundation for increasing mitigation efforts over time. Thus, delivering on these pledges will require effective policies to drive the deployment of low-carbon technologies today and technological innovation in the future to ramp ambition up on par with the risks of climate change.

Climate change is a problem no country can solve by itself. Since the mid-1990s, the United States has advocated for developed and developing countries to work together in combating climate change and, with the United States' leadership, the 2015 Paris Agreement delivered unprecedented commitments by virtually every country on the planet to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Now, the election of Donald J. Trump, an avowed global warming skeptic, has thrown America's commitment to global leadership in doubt. If the United States quits the fight against climate change, this risks unraveling the global coalition and could result in other countries following suit. This would be a tragic mistake with incalculable consequences for the entire planet. Moreover, some nations may retaliate against the United States by imposing tariffs on American-manufactured goods based on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their production.

Marginal-cost-based dynamic pricing of electric· ity services, including real power, reactive power, and reserves, may provide unprecedented efficiencies and system synergies that are pivotal to the sustainability of massive re· newable generation integrat ion. Extension of wholesale high-voltage power markets to allow distribution network connected prosumers to participate, albeit desirable, has stalled on high transaction costs and the lack of a tractable market clearing framework. This paper presents a distributed, massively parallel architecture that enables tractable transmission and distribution locational marginal price (T&DLMP) discovery along with optimal scheduling of centralized generation, decentralized conventional and flexible loads, and distributed energy resources (DERs). DERs include distributed generation; electric vehicle (EV) battery charging and storage; heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) and c:ombined heat & power (CHP) microgenerators; computing; volt/var control devices; grid-friendly applianc:es; smart transformers; and more. The proposed iterative distributed architecture can discover T&DLMPs while capturing the full c:omplexity of each participating DER's intertemporal preferences and physical system dynamics.

Brown, Ashley. Challenging the Traditional Utility Business Model." Presentation to the 2016 Energy Symposium & User Groups. Atlantic Beach, FL, March 3, 2016."

Vogelsang, Ingo. The Convergence of Simple Regulatory Incentive Mechanisms for Electricity Transmission Pricing / Investment." Presentation to the CIDE Electricity Policy Group. Mexico City, April 14, 2016."