S2E13: Ari Peskoe of Harvard Law School's Electricity Law Institute speaks to the difficulty of bringing clean energy resources on line under outdated federal and state laws

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. 

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