Abstract:
The U.S. electricity system is premised on the ideas that utilities have a duty to serve all customers in their service territories and that electricity supply should always meet demand. But a rapid increase in data center energy needs is revealing problems with those premises. To meet this moment, and to address future electrical-supply challenges, we propose a partial shift to a new system, in which major new electricity consumers can connect to the grid even where electrical supply will not always be sufficient, can have their use curtailed by utilities, and can use secondary markets to hedge against curtailment risk. We explore the potential for this new approach by using examples from natural gas management and water law in the western United States. In both fields, a foundational assumption is that supply will sometimes fall short of demand, and both fields therefore hold potential lessons for electricity-supply challenges.

Alexandra Klass Biography:
Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at Michigan Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of energy law, environmental law, natural resources law, tort law, and property law. From April 2022 to July 2023, she served in the Biden-Harris administration as deputy general counsel for energy efficiency and clean energy demonstrations at the US Department of Energy.

Klass’s recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation’s electric transmission grid, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges.

She is a co-author of Energy Law: Concepts and Insights Series, second edition (Foundation Press, 2020), Energy Law and Policy, third edition (West Academic Publishing, 2022), and Natural Resources Law: A Place-Based Book of Problems and Cases, fifth edition (Wolters Kluwer, 2022).

Before her appointment at the University of Michigan, Klass was a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. During her time on the Minnesota Law faculty, she was named the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year in 2010 and 2020, and she served as associate dean for academic affairs from 2010 to 2012. She was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2015 and at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2019.

Before her teaching career, Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation.

Klass has served in leadership positions in state and national bar organizations and nonprofits. She was a longtime member of the board of directors of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and chaired the group’s legal committee. In 2020, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appointed her to the Governor’s Advisory Council on Climate Change, where she served until 2022. In 2017, she received the Eldon G. Kaul Distinguished Service Award, presented by the Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law Section of the Minnesota State Bar Association to “a member of the bench or bar who has demonstrated a significant commitment and made an outstanding contribution to environmental, natural resources, or energy law in the state of Minnesota.”

Dave Owen Biography:
Dave Owen is the Albert Abramson ’54 Distinguished Professor and the Associate Dean for Research at UC Law San Francisco (formerly Hastings), where he teaches courses in environmental, water, energy and administrative law. His research spans those same fields, with a primary focus on water resource management. He previously taught at the University of Maine School of Law, practiced water law, and, before law school, worked as an environmental consultant. He has won UC Law SF’s highest teaching award, and several of his articles have been selected by peers as top environmental-law articles of their respective years.