Papers presented by Ben Kodres-O'Brien since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"The Dash for Gas: Horizontal Drills, Combustion Turbines, and the Uneven Restructuring of the US Power Sector"

Abstract:

At the height of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, when Democrats swept the House, Senate, and presidency, half of all electricity generated in the US came from coal, while only one-fifth came from gas. In a little more than a decade, those shares had nearly inverted—a process that amounts to the single largest source of greenhouse gas emission reductions in the US to date. Although federal regulations like the Clean Air Act reinforced this process, this paper argues that the most important drivers of this transition were technological and economic change: horizontal fossil-fuel drilling techniques, or “fracking,” in combination with significant improvements to the efficiency of combustion turbines, changed the economics of electricity generation. This paper focuses on the US power sector’s very first energy transition—“the dash for gas”—in three regions where it was most prominent: Texas, the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (“PJM”), and the Southeast. The paper considers if, why, and how governmental institutions may have influenced the transition. All three of these regions saw a marked (though uneven) transition from coal to gas, suggesting the dominance of external factors, like technical innovation, broader policies outside the power sector, economics, and even geography). Even so, regional institutional differences within the power sector remain important. While Texas and states in PJM largely “deregulated” their electricity sectors, unbundling generation from transmission and distribution, and joined Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that operate competitive wholesale real-time “spot” markets for power, none of the states in the Southeast have joined an RTO, and most have retained traditional rate-regulation of vertically-integrated utilities as their primary governance model. As a result, the timing of each region’s transition differs slightly, and each region uses gas turbines differently to meet electricity demand—facts which significantly affect the possibilities for a wider transition to carbon-free electricity.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Nuclear Follies? Commercial Nuclear Power in the American South"

Abstract:

Commercial nuclear power has a fraught and paradoxical history, especially in the US. In the southwest, it is a story of indigenous exploitation and toxicity; in the east, of risk and accident; in the northwest and northeast, of cost overruns and financial restructuring; and in the north and on the coasts in general, of reactor shutdowns and utility bankruptcies. And yet, shockingly, nuclear power is the single largest source of carbon-free electricity generation in the US nationwide today. Most histories of nuclear power in the US focus on follies and failures. This paper, by contrast, reconsiders nuclear power’s history by balancing these with its modest successes. It does so by comparing the development of nuclear projects in the US south—like those for the Tennessee Valley Authority, Duke Energy, and Southern Company—with some of their counterparts in the northwest and northeast—as in the Washington Public Power Supply System and for utilities in New York. Southern “successes” in building—and, moreover, maintaining—large nuclear fleets are not unrelated. Much more than their northern and coastal counterparts, utilities in the South continue to operate primarily in jurisdictions with traditional cost-plus rate regulation, allowing them to recoup the substantial cost of upfront investment and maintenance. In the south, moreover, new nuclear power plants were often cost-competitive with, or even cheaper than, comparable coal plants on a per-kilowatt basis, suggesting that nuclear power was not, as Amory Lovins has famously maintained, “fundamentally uneconomic.” A fresh look at the history of nuclear power that explains not just its follies and catastrophes but combines these with its successes ought to be a jumping off point for discussion of what a realistic future for nuclear power in the US can or should look like given the unique political circumstances in the US surrounding the 21st century struggle to decarbonize its electricity mix. [SAM note: chair/discussant Julie Cohn, U. of Houston, cohnconnor@gmail.com]