Energy and Utilities Law Commons^™

Owning Geothermal Energy, Gabriel Eckstein

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Geothermal energy holds vast potential for decarbonizing the U.S. energy system, yet the sector remains significantly underdeveloped, supplying only 0.4% of the nation's electricity. A principal barrier to growth is the fragmented and ambiguous legal landscape currently governing ownership of geothermal resources: thirty-three states lack any clear statutory or common-law framework identifying who owns subsurface thermal energy. This Article examines the physical characteristics of geothermal energy, recent developments in the U.S. geothermal sector, and the principal doctrinal approaches that might govern ownership of subsurface heat, including the ad coelum doctrine, common-pool and open-access frameworks, the rule of capture, and public …

Shifting Structural Power: The Tech Energy Transition, Amy L. Stein

UF Law Faculty Publications

For the first time in over a decade, flat and stagnant electricity demand is expected to skyrocket. This increased demand is driven in large part by data centers that support artificial intelligence, crypto mining, and cloud computing. This is straining the electric grid, its stakeholders, and legal constructs in significant ways. Legal energy scholarship has spent the last fifteen years focused on the challenges of managing an electric grid transitioning to clean energy, in a world where privately owned electric utilities maintain powerful monopolies across the country. But there are no accounts of how the balance of power in this …

Shifting Structural Power: The Tech Energy Transition, Amy L. Stein

Indiana Law Journal

For the first time in over a decade, flat and stagnant electricity demand is expected to skyrocket. This increased demand is driven in large part by data centers that support artificial intelligence, crypto mining, and cloud computing. This is straining the electric grid, its stakeholders, and legal constructs in significant ways. Legal energy scholarship has spent the last fifteen years focused on the challenges of managing an electric grid transitioning to clean energy, in a world where privately owned electric utilities maintain powerful monopolies across the country. But there are no accounts of how the balance of power in this …

Climate Proof Electricity, Kristen Van De Biezenbos

Utah Law Review

The devastating impacts of climate change make themselves known in the form of fires, floods, droughts, storms, extreme heat and cold, and worsening socioeconomic conditions around the globe. At the same time, the U.S. electricity system has never been more vulnerable to severe weather. Even as we embark on a national project to decarbonize the electricity system by 2035, the U.S. leads the developed world in power outages. These outages are in large part due to aging infrastructure, improperly weatherized systems, vegetation crashing down on transmission and distribution lines and—perhaps most devastating of all—wildfires caused by fallen power lines in …

Consumer Willingness-To-Pay For A Resilient Electrical Grid, Warigia M. Bowman, Dayton M. Lambert, Joseph T. Ripberger, Hank Jenkins-Smith, Carol L. Silva, Michael A. Long, Kuhika Gupta, Andrew Fox

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

The research objective is to estimate consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for electricity grid fortification. Data are from a representative survey of Oklahoma citizens. Extreme weather events, aging utility infrastructure, increased demand for affordable energy, and terrorism threaten the safety and security of the way most citizens access electricity. This study is a first look at public willingness to support energy grid security measures in the United States Southern Great Plains. Findings suggest that consumers would pay an additional $14.69 in monthly utility bills for a fortified grid. This WTP estimate is close to a recent energy bill hike of …

California, An Island?, Lincoln L. Davies, Stephanie Lenhart

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

A monumental change quietly is unfolding in the American West. For decades, the region has lagged the rest of the nation in coordinating electricity operations. Multiple efforts to change this stalled or never got off the ground. Now, everything is different. In the face of climate uncertainty and deepening concern that the region is unprepared for its energy future, stakeholders—government, industry, interest groups—are posturing to create formal electricity markets that will transform the region’s infrastructure, resilience, and economy for the remainder of this century.

Two paths are on the table. In one, much if not all the West will join …

Renovating America's Electrical Grid: Renewable Sources And Resilient Delivery, Justin O'Hare Giffee

Student Theses 2015-Present

Since the late 1800s, America’s electrical grid systems have relied primarily upon fossil fuels for sources of electricity. Due to the outdated structural foundations and glaring holes in distribution networks, the existing electrical grids struggle with electricity escaping, and modern issues such as cybersecurity, resilience, and weather-related events associated with climate change. This essay discusses ongoing problems with current electric grid systems and aims at explaining the importance of incorporating renewables as a solution for these problems into a new grid system. In the first chapter, a detailed explanation is provided regarding the current issues present in America's grid systems. …

24/7 Clean Energy, Todd S. Aagaard

Faculty Publications

In the face of the rapidly escalating climate crisis, the electricity sector is moving toward renewable energy. To date, policies and strategies have focused on increasing overall renewable energy generation, with little regard for timing and location. The result has been a misalignment of supply and demand in renewable energy markets. Renewable power projects produce energy when and where it is least expensive, leaving supply scarce at other times and places. Consumers, meanwhile, continue to use power when and where they need it. This mismatch increases the electricity grid’s dependence on fossil fuel–fired electricity to meet electricity demand at times …

U.S. Energy Information Administration Information Resources, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides information about the resources produced by U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration. These resources cover energy statistics for U.S., states, the United States, and foreign countries. They also cover energy products as varied as coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, petroleum, and renewable energy.

Comparative Analysis Between Saudi Arabia And Norway In Moving Beyond Fossil Fuels Towards A Sustainable Economy: A Special Emphasis On The Renewable Energy Sector, Saad Nasser Alqahtani

Dissertations & Theses

Saudi Arabia is the largest economy in the Middle East and the 18th largest in the world. The country has the world's second-largest proven petroleum reserves and is the largest exporter of petroleum. In 2016, Saudi Arabia had the third highest estimated value of natural resources at $34.4 trillion (US). However, because of the 2014 oil crash, climate change, and the development of renewable energy technology, the government has decided to transition from its complete reliance on oil revenues and to start investing heavily in other non-oil sectors, such as the renewable energy sector. The Saudi government plans to generate …

Powerhouses: A Comparative Analysis Of Blockchain-Enabled Smart Microgrids, Michael Mattioli, Scott J. Shackelford

Articles by Maurer Faculty

For over a century, electricity in the United States has been generated and sold mainly by centralized powerplants. Although this model of power collection and distribution has many advantages, resiliency is a growing problem. Brittle infrastructure and growing complexity have made the nation’s power grid less reliable over the past twenty years. Some technologists believe the solution is to go small. In the past five years, small communities in the United States and overseas have built “micro-grids”—networks of roof-top solar panels that store electricity in communal banks of batteries, combined with software that allows homeowners and businesses to buy and …

Rethinking Grid Governance For The Climate Change Era, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

The electricity sector is often appropriately called the linchpin of efforts to respond to climate change. Over the next few decades, the U.S. electricity sector will need to double in size to accommodate electric vehicles, at the same time that it transforms to run entirely on clean energy. To drive this transformation, states are increasingly adopting 100% clean energy targets. But fossil fuel corporations are pushing back, seeking to maintain their structural domination of the U.S. energy sector. This article calls attention to one central but under-scrutinized way that these companies impede the clean energy transition: Incumbent fossil fuel companies …

The Bounds Of Energy Law, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

U.S. energy law was born of fossil fuels. Consequently, our energy law has long centered on the material and legal puzzles that bringing fossil fuels to market presents. Eliminating these same carbon-producing energy sources, however, has emerged as perhaps the most pressing material transformation needed in the twenty-first century—and one that energy law scholarship has rightfully embraced. Yet in our admirable quest to aid in this transformation, energy law scholars are largely writing into the field bequeathed to us, proposing changes that tweak, but do not fundamentally challenge, last century’s tools for managing the extraction, transport, and delivery of fossil …

A Bridge To Nowhere? Our Energy Transition And The Natural Gas Pipeline Wars, Sam Kalen

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

This article chronicles how natural gas has replaced coal as today’s energy dilemma. The pipeline wars illustrate landowners’ concern with special treatment for industry seeking to condemn lands, while some states and the public object to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC or Commission) approach to approving new pipeline projects, or the Commission’s assessment of GHG emissions associated with project development.

Part II examines the pipeline wars in their historical context, portraying the rise of natural gas regulation, its increasing dominance as a fuel source, its associated environmental consequences, and the marked differences in how the Obama and Trump administrations …

Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy is structurally ill-equipped to confront climate change. As the story goes, because each of us tends to dismiss consequences that befall people in other places and in future times, “the people” cannot be trusted to craft adequate decarbonization policies, designed to reduce present-day, domestic carbon emissions. Accordingly, U.S. climate change policy has focused on technocratic fixes that operate predominantly through executive action to escape democratic politics — with vanishingly little to show for it after a change in presidential administration.

To help craft a more durable U.S. climate change strategy, this Article scrutinizes the purported …

Uncovering Wholesale Electricity Market Principles, Michael Panfil, Rama Zakaria

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

This paper examines, enunciates, and makes explicit a set of market principles historically relied upon by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to regulate wholesale electricity markets as required under the Federal Power Act (FPA). These identified competitive market principles are supported by policy and legal foundations that run through a myriad of FERC orders and court decisions. This paper seeks to make that history and those implicit market principles explicit by distilling and organizing Commission Orders and court decisions. It concludes that five market principles, each with multiple subprinciples, can be identified as elemental to how FERC understands and …

Greening The Old New Deal: Strengthening Rural Electric Cooperative Supports And Oversight To Combat Climate Change, Gabriel Pacyniak

Faculty Scholarship

New Deal cooperatives succeeded in electrifying rural America when for-profit utilities would not. Today, however, rural electric cooperatives are lagging behind when it comes to meeting the challenge of climate change. Cooperatives have collectively been slower to embrace the shift to low-carbon electricity than for-profit and municipal utilities and have served as a drag on state and federal clean energy and climate policies. This is partially because of the structural differences between cooperatives and other utilities, but also because of a weak and under-determined federal and state regulatory structure. A few cooperatives in Colorado and New Mexico are seeking to …

The Quiet Undoing: How Regional Electricity Market Reforms Threaten Clean Energy Goals, Shelley Welton, Danny Cullenward

Faculty Publications

In a series of largely unnoticed but extremely consequential moves, two regional electricity market operators are pursuing reforms to make it more difficult for states to achieve their clean energy goals. The federal energy regulator, FERC, has already approved one such reform and ordered a second market operator to go farther in punishing state-supported clean energy resources than it had initially proposed. In this Essay, we bring to light the ways in which the intricate, technical reforms underway in regional electricity markets threaten state climate change objectives and the durability of FERC’s regional market constructs. If FERC allows private market …

Microgrids: Legal And Regulatory Hurdles For A More Resilient Energy Infrastructure, Raquel Parks

Pace Environmental Law Review

Natural disasters and climate change have made it apparent that energy infrastructure needs to be modernized and microgrids are one type of technology that can help the electricity grid become more resilient, reliable, and efficient. Different states have begun developing microgrid pilot projects including California, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the first city to propose implementing “energy districts” of microgrids that will serve as critical infrastructure, in the first phase, and then expand to commercial and community settings. This large project involves many shareholders including public utilities, government agencies, and private entities. Utilizing microgrids …

Electricity Competition And The Public Good: Rethinking Markets And Monopolies, Jonas J. Monast

University of Colorado Law Review

The United States electricity sector is engaged in a long-term experiment regarding the proper role of market competition. Many states that transitioned to competitive electricity markets in the early 2000s are again reconsidering the relationship between market competition and public policy goals. Low natural gas prices, falling costs of renewable energy and energy storage, and improvements in efficiency are causing early retirements of coal and nuclear power plants and thus affecting environmental policy goals and economic interests. States that continue to rely on monopoly utilities for electricity are also reconsidering the role of competition, but from a different angle. Rather …

Microgrids For Micro-Communities: Reducing The Energy Burden In Rural Areas, Julie C. Michalski

Michigan Technology Law Review

Rural communities currently face some of the highest energy costs and lowest reliability in the country, due in part to long transmission distances and low population densities. The North American Supergrid (“NAS”) has been proposed as a solution for increased grid stability, resiliency, and renewable generation with decreased carbon emissions and energy cost across the lower 48 states. Although the NAS could help with these energy goals, it is likely that benefits of the NAS would bypass many rural or isolated communities outside of the transmission step-down points. As the NAS will not help rural communities, states can take regulatory …

Carbon Pricing In New York Iso Markets: Federal And State Issues, Justin Gundlach, Romany Webb

Pace Environmental Law Review

New York’s Clean Energy Standard (“CES”), adopted in August 2016, aims to steer the state’s electricity sector away from carbon-intensive generation sources. It supports low-carbon alternatives by requiring retail electricity suppliers to purchase credits, the proceeds from which are paid to renewable and nuclear generators. Recognizing that this will affect the operation of wholesale electricity markets, New York’s electric transmission grid operator (the “New York Independent System Operator” or “NYISO”) has commenced a review to assess possible means of incorporating the cost of carbon emissions into market prices. This Article explores two approaches to carbon pricing in NYISO markets: the …

Can Clean Energy Policy Promote Environmental, Economic, And Social Sustainability?, Felix Mormann

Faculty Scholarship

Two and a half decades of clean energy policymaking focused primarily on environmental and economic sustainability have yielded considerable environmental and economic benefits. Along the way, however, other policy considerations, such as the social sustainability of the transition to a cleaner, renewably fueled energy economy, have gone largely overlooked. As clean energy technologies continue to gain ever-greater traction in the United States and global energy economies, the social impacts of their enabling policies become more and more salient. Already, ratepayers, taxpayers, and other stakeholders who fear being left behind by the clean energy transition question the “fairness” of today’s renewable …

Free Trade In Electric Power, Joel B. Eisen, Felix Mormann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article develops the core legal framework of a new electricity-trading ecosystem in which anyone, anytime, anywhere, can trade electricity in any amount with anyone else. The proliferation of solar and other distributed energy resources, business model innovation in the sharing economy, and climate change present enormous challenges — and opportunities — for America’s energy economy. But the electricity industry is ill equipped to adapt to and benefit from these transformative forces, with much of its physical infrastructure, regulatory institutions, and business models a relic of the early days of electrification. We suggest a systematic rethinking to usher in a …

Electricity Markets And The Social Project Of Decarbonization, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

Decarbonization is the process of converting our economy from one that runs predominantly on energy derived from fossil fuels to one that runs almost exclusively on clean, carbon-free energy. If pursued on the scale that experts believe necessary to prevent dangerous climate change, the infrastructure changes required to decarbonize the United States will have significant social and cultural implications. States aggressively pursuing decarbonization have adopted policies reflecting their under-standing that decarbonization is a social project implicating numerous value choices. Various state decarbonization policies combine the aim of decarbonization with job promotion, economic development, income redistribution, urban revitalization, open-space preservation, and …

The New(Clear?) Electricity Federalism: Federal Preemption Of States’ “Zero Emissions Credit” Programs, Joel Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

This Article proposes and applies a “conscious disregard” test for resolving the upcoming appellate litigation that involves the conflict between federal authority over the electric grid and state laws providing subsidies to nuclear power plants in the form of “zero emissions credits” (ZECs). This test draws upon principles of conflict preemption, as elaborated in three recent Supreme Court decisions on the intersection of state and federal jurisdiction over the electric grid under the Federal Power Act. It provides that if a state law explicitly aims to directly affect wholesale electricity market prices, terms or conditions, its subsidy program is impermissible …

Free Trade In Electric Power, Joel Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

This Article develops the core legal framework of a new electricity-trading ecosystem in which anyone, anytime, anywhere, can trade electricity in any amount with anyone else. The proliferation of solar and other distributed energy resources, business model innovation in the sharing economy, and climate change present enormous challenges — and opportunities — for America’s energy economy. But the electricity industry is ill equipped to adapt to and benefit from these transformative forces, with much of its physical infrastructure, regulatory institutions, and business models a relic of the early days of electrification. We suggest a systematic rethinking to usher in a …

Batteries Included: Incentivizing Energy Storage, Lindsay Breslau, Michael Croweak, Alan Witt

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

Distributed Energy Storage (“DES”) technologies that allow households and businesses to store substantial amounts of electricity on site are rapidly advancing and could soon have dramatic impacts on the nation’s electricity generation, transmission, and distribution markets. These technologies could provide numerous benefits, including enhanced energy security, grid stability, and greater support for renewable generation technologies, but several obstacles are slowing their adoption throughout the country. Among these obstacles are stubbornly high manufacturing costs and the potential impacts of DES development on utilities and the traditional energy regulatory framework. Fortunately, policymakers in California, New York, Hawaii, and some other states are …

Nigeria's Power Sector Roadmap: Policy Perspectives And Prospects, Bandele A. G. Amoo, O. M. Adebayo, Derek Ibeagha

Bullion

Various strategies have been employed over the years by the Government to boost power in the country. These strategies have been hinged on policies, reforms and roadmaps, including the 2005 Electric Power Sector Reform Act, the Roadmap for Power Sector Reform 2010 and the current Roadmap for Change. A perfunctory look at previous reforms has resulted in significant progress, including unbundling and privatizing the long-standing government-owned monopoly in the power sector. This paper takes a comprehensive assessment of the Roadmap of Change comparing it to previous policies, isolating policy perspectives, prospects and challenges facing it. It also gleans lessons from …

Grid Modernization And Energy Poverty, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

Grid modernization holds the alluring promise of rationalizing electricity pricing, saving consumers money, and improving environmental quality all at the same time. Yet, we have seen only limited and patchwork regulatory initiatives towards significant grid modernization in the United States. Outside of a few leading states, state energy regulators appear loath to embrace fullthroated versions of the project. This article argues that the underdiscussed problem of energy poverty in the United States is a critical contributing factor in the gap between grid modernization’s possibilities and our regulatory reality. Only by explicitly understanding how the issues of grid modernization and energy …