Type: Public event

"Is the utility of the future sustainable?" a lecture by Severin Borenstein

Date & time

Sep 22, 2014, 4:00-5:30 pm EDT

Location

Weill Hall, Annenberg Auditorium
735 S. State Street, Ann Arbor MI, 48109

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

About the topic:

Renewable, distributed and intermittent energy sources are becoming a larger share of electricity generation, challenging the century-old model of financing and managing electricity networks. Borenstein will discuss the economic changes that are likely to occur in the utility business model as renewables expand: how wholesale electricity markets will be affected, the impact on retail electricity distribution, and the incentives created for generators, distributors and consumers of electricity. He will also examine the role of demand response, storage, and transmission in adapting to the new realities of the electricity business. 

From the speaker's bio:

Severin Borenstein is E.T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business. He has just stepped down from his extraordinarily effective 20-year directorship of the University of California Energy Institute and is visiting the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy for two months. 

He received his A.B. from U.C. Berkeley and Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.  His research focuses on business competition, strategy, and regulation. He has published extensively on the airline industry, the oil and gasoline industries, and electricity markets. His current research projects include the economics of renewable energy, economic policies for reducing greenhouse gases, alternative models of retail electricity pricing, and competitive dynamics in the airline industry. Borenstein is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. He served on the Board of Governors of the California Power Exchange from 1997 to 2003. During 1999-2000, he was a member of the California Attorney General's Gasoline Price Task Force. In 2010-11, Borenstein was a member of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood's Future of Aviation Advisory Committee. In 2012-13, he served on the Emissions Market Assessment Committee, which advised the California Air Resources Board on the operation of California’s Cap and Trade market for greenhouse gases.

For more information, please contact [email protected].