By David Bobzien and Will Toor

As the Intermountain West experienced record fires and floods in Glenwood Canyon, closing a main interstate highway to traffic for two weeks, and multiple wildfires raged across the Sierra Nevada mountains, forcing entire communities to evacuate, it is impossible to ignore the real and lasting effects of the ongoing climate crisis.

To address this crisis, our states — Colorado and Nevada — are leading the way, adopting ambitious clean energy goals. Specifically, Colorado enacted legislation ensuring at least an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas pollution from electric utilities by 2030 and Nevada adopted an ambitious renewable portfolio standard, requiring 50 percent renewables by 2030. The low cost of wind and solar energy allows our states’ utilities to rapidly decarbonize while maintaining affordable and reliable electricity.

By Miranda A. Ballentine and Todd A. Snitchler

American innovators, entrepreneurs and businesses are constantly evolving, competing against each other to develop groundbreaking technologies and solving our country’s most challenging problems. Similarly, it is time to unleash the power of innovation through competition once again to solve this century’s challenges of modernizing and preparing our vital electricity grid for climate change.

The interstate electricity system is stymied under the same traditional utility design that was established nearly 100 years ago. This outdated structure inhibits competition in the West and southeastern United States and limits clean energy ambitions and options for the businesses and energy consumers we represent. Under the Biden administration, the federal government is serious about tackling the climate crisis and should follow the lead of American businesses and support expanding our nation’s organized wholesale electricity markets.

By Rob Gramlich and Michael Hogan

Competitive wholesale electricity markets are at a turning point, caught between a rapidly decarbonizing resource mix spurred by falling clean energy prices, and market structures designed around fossil fuels. Markets are becoming increasingly ill equipped to handle large amounts of cheap renewable energy and flexible distributed energy resources.

A new research paper series led by Energy Innovation seeks to answer the critical question facing grid managers and regulators: What wholesale market design provides the best framework for reliably integrating clean resources and decarbonizing the power system at least cost?

This two-part opinion series outlines underlying questions about wholesale market reform, and introduces two separate pathways for markets to evolve.