America’s Power Plan

America’s Power Plan was created as a platform for innovative thinking about how to manage the transformation happening in the electric power sector today. We brought together America’s clean energy thought leaders to assemble information on a package of policies, markets, and regulations to maximize the grid’s affordability, reliability/resilience, and environmental performance. America’s Power Plan work now continues through Energy Innovation.

Electricity policy is at a crossroads—a conversation about feed-in tariffs or fixed charges is inextricably linked to a full-blown discussion about rate design, wholesale power markets, grid management, and utility business models. Without a holistic approach to power sector transformation, policymakers may find it difficult to tackle today’s challenges.

Energy Innovation curates expert content from the field, with the aim of integrating previously-siloed work into a package of solutions for regulators, policymakers, market operators, utilities, independent energy service providers, and other power sector professionals. The foundational series of eight papers was originally published as a special issue of the Electricity Journal.

Resources

Transmission Policy: Planning for and Investing in Wires

John Jimison, Bill White, September 201333 pages; 396 KB

This whitepaper, written as part of America’s Power Plan, describes the need to update and improve America’s grid infrastructure. This is especially important as new energy sources and distributed generation are increasingly added to the system. This paper suggests five…

New Utility Business Models: Utility and Regulatory Models for the Modern Era

Ron Lehr– Western Grid Group; former Colorado Public Utilities Commissioner , January 201334 pages; 413 KB

This whitepaper, written as part of America’s Power Plan, describes the changing role of electric utility companies as new technologies for energy efficiency and distributed generation pose threats to their traditional business models. Aging infrastructure, changing customer demands, and stricter environmental and climate regulations additionally incite the need for evolution of utility structures. This paper offers recommendations for several types of utility structures, but focuses mostly on vertically-integrated and regulated utilities. It outlines three future scenarios for utilities; minimum utility involvement, medium involvement as smart integrator; or orchestrator; or maximum role as energy services utility.

Distributed Energy Resources: Policy Implications of Decentralization

James Newcomb, Mathias Bell, Lena Hansen, Virginia Lacy, September 201348 pages; 880 KB

This whitepaper, written as part of America’s Power Plan, describes the role of distributed energy resources, also known as ‘the internet of electricity,’in the electricity sector and how its emergence alters the sector’s traditional centralized structure. It recommends three options for expanding distributed energy resources so that a renewable electricity future can be achieved. These recommendations include 1) analyzing the costs, benefits, and trade-offs associated with distributed energy resources; 2) level the playing field between new distributed resources and traditional centralized energy by adapting utility business models and wholesale market structures to become more competitive, and 3) encourage innovation in technology and services to expedite the adoption of distributed and renewable resources.

Finance Policy: Removing Investment Barriers and Managing Risk

Todd Foley, Uday Varadarajan, Richard Caperton, September 201322 pages

This whitepaper, written as part of America’s Power Plan, discusses investment opportunities to support upgrades to America’s aging grid system. Financing upgrades to the grid system requires policy, regulation, and market structures that 1) eliminate barriers to cost-effective financing by enabling long-term debt and equity financing, and 2) enable investors to realize the full value of the new assets they deploy, such as reduced emissions or increased reliability.

Rethinking Policy to Deliver a Clean Energy Future

Hal Harvey, Sonia Aggarwal, September 201332 pages; 680 KB

This paper provides an overview of America’s Power Plan (APP), a series of papers on how policymakers, market operators, and utilities can address changing market conditions head-on. The papers cover wholesale market design, utility business models, finance policy, transmission policy, distributed energy resources, distributed generation, and siting. Energy Innovation’s Director of Strategy, Sonia Aggarwal, directed research for APP’s development.

Aligning Power Markets to Deliver Value

Mike Hogan – Regulatory Assistance Project, October 2013

Power markets and power market mechanisms could use an upgrade to take advantage of new resources and fairly compensate the resources already on the system for the services they provide. Power markets should increase energy efficiency, upgrade system operations to…

Siting Policy: Finding a Home for Renewable Energy and Transmission

October 2013

This paper focuses on the reforms needed to locate, coordinate, and expedite any new generation or transmission that the grid system requires. New approaches will require engaging stakeholders early, accelerating innovative policy and business models, coordinating among regulatory bodies, employing…