Faculty Spotlight: Energy Law and Fixing the Power Grid with Joshua Macey

Professor of Law Joshua Macey ’17, who received tenure in January 2026, teaches and writes about bankruptcy, environmental law, energy law, and the regulation of financial institutions. His latest work focuses on the fragility of the nation’s electric grid and offers strategies to improve grid reliability and accelerate the transition to new sources of energy.

In 2023, the American Bankruptcy Institute named Macey to its list of 40 Under 40 Emerging Leaders in Insolvency Practice. Macey has also won the Morrison Prize — awarded to the “most impactful sustainability-related legal academic paper published in North America during the previous year” — for three consecutive years.

Prior to joining the faculty at Yale Law School in 2024, Macey taught at the University of Chicago Law School and Cornell Law School. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley and clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

In the Q&A below, Macey discusses improving the reliability of the U.S. power grid, how to keep up with demand from data centers, and his advice for students interested in careers in energy law.

In your Energy Law course, you show students your own electric bill and go over it line by line. What kind of information can you glean about energy policy from a household electric bill?

When you read your utility bill carefully, you see that the way we design rates doesn’t provide strong incentives to reduce consumption. Ratepayers also typically have very little choice in picking their supplier, and they are paying for a lot of state policies, some of which have little connection to electricity rates. I want them to understand how pricing decisions influence and distort utility investment, how the decision to grant a firm a legal right to a monopoly leads to perverse governance and regulatory incentives, and how challenging it is to change that system. 

The U.S. electric grid is under strain, with extreme weather and blackouts on the rise. One of your recent papers argues that a primary cause of our unreliable grid is a failure of grid governance. Can you explain more?

The U.S. grid infrastructure is under strain for a lot of reasons, but governance is a big one, in my opinion. We have designed these semiprivate self-regulatory organizations to administer wholesale electricity markets, plan transmission investment, and make sure we build enough supply to meet future demand. These entities are largely governed by incumbent utilities that owned or operated grid infrastructure for most of the 20th century, and they have strong financial reasons to resist reforms that would expose their existing assets to competition from independent power producers. As we struggle to get new resources online, we should at least be aware that many institutions that develop market rules are governed by entities that can boost their profits by limiting competition.

Power grids in many states are also struggling to keep up with demand from data centers and costs are soaring. What can lawmakers and regulators do to help solve this issue?

First, you should make it easier to build and permit infrastructure. Second, you should allow data centers to bring their own generation when they are able to. But a lot of the most important reforms involve connecting to the grid and making sure enough supply enters the market. 

One good idea is to do something called the connect and manage approach to interconnecting to the grid. Typically, before connecting to the grid, transmission operators conduct a lengthy study to determine whether the new generating unit will cause stability or reliability issues. If so, the transmission owner upgrades its transmission network to make sure the unit can connect to the market. Instead of doing that, we should let resources connect more quickly so long as they accept the risk that they can be forced to shut down if or when they contribute to voltage or frequency issues. 

Similarly, when deciding how to move through the connection queue, we should auction off interconnection positions instead of moving sequentially. Finally, we need to really think about how to allow more competitive processes for identifying where to build transmission and generation, and who can build it.

In another article, you argue that public utilities are entrenched monopolies that engage in classic anticompetitive conduct at the expense of customers, citing a case involving Duke Energy in North Carolina. Do regulators need to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust law?

Yes, electric utilities are given a legal right to a monopoly. Too often, they can use that monopoly privilege to give themselves an advantage in a competitive market (such as the market for selling electric energy). Antitrust regulators have been reluctant to use antitrust tools, perhaps because the industry is technical, and perhaps because other regulators analyze market power abuses. But antitrust has a proud history in utility industries, and given the significant opportunities for abuse, antitrust regulators should not abandon the field to regulators like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Department of Energy (DOE), who do not have as much experience or expertise regulating anticompetitive conduct.

You advise students who are interested in careers in energy law to consider working at the state level, as well as the federal level or for a national environmental nonprofit. Why are states a good place to be?

It’s great to work at FERC or DOE or at the environmental nonprofits. But a lot of the most important energy work is happening at state public utility commissions, and those are careers that should be attractive to our students, especially those who are focused on climate change or energy affordability.