Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Eve Vogel, UMass Amherst

; Regine Spector, UMass Amherst

Description:

What role do competitive wholesale electricity markets play in advancing a renewable, just, and environmentally minded energy system? Critiques of neoliberal and marketization processes highlight the inequalities, dislocations, and externalities inherent in the creation of competitive or "free" markets. In the electricity sector in the U.S. over the last three decades, "deregulation," more accurately restructuring (including creating markets and reregulation), has been driven in part by efforts to elevate public-interest priorities related to cost and energy efficiency, and increasing renewable energy production. Today, as analysts and policymakers across the globe search for tools to advance rapid decarbonization in the electric sector, market tools are often the mechanisms of choice. Yet at the same time, these changes have also unleashed new rounds of globalization of profits, new incentives to preserve the fossil-fuel based status quo, new ways for incumbents or early entrants to monopolize competition, contestations around what constitutes "renewable" energy, and repeated crises of blackouts, disastrous price spikes, and/or bankruptcies. How do these tensions play out in concrete places around the country and the world? What can we learn about the pitfalls and possibilities of market mechanisms as tools to shift our wholesale electricity systems to more sustainable and just systems? Who benefits, and what are the intended and unintended consequences and effects of wholesale marketizing processes on human and non-human populations alike?

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda