Penn State: “Amid Renewable-Energy Boom, Study Explores Options for Electricity Market”
Work by frequent RFF collaborator Chiara Lo Prete and RFF researchers Karen Palmer and Molly Robertson is profiled in this piece.
“Renewable energy sources like wind and solar generation now account for over 20 percent of electricity in the United States—and keep growing after large-scale production more than doubled since 2000. Still, high-profile power failures illustrate persistent challenges from the lack of available capacity to provide enough energy at times of need, said Chiara Lo Prete, an associate professor of energy economics in the John and Willie Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State.
The issue isn’t insufficient generation but an unreliable ability to deliver ample power when customer use spikes, particularly where renewable resources and natural gas dominate power production, Lo Prete said. To better support the clean-energy transition, she and colleagues at a Washington, DC-based nonprofit studied 11 electricity market design proposals under consideration by grid operators. These designs put forward different approaches to guide energy generation and sources, as well as use across every sector of the energy market...
At Resources for the Future, contributing to the paper were Karen Palmer, senior fellow and director of the Electric Power Program, and associate fellow Molly Robertson.”
