Procedural Justice at State Commissions
Elizabeth Stein is the State Policy Director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. Elizabeth’s work focuses on utility regulation and environmental and energy policy. Before joining Policy Integrity, Elizabeth was Lead Counsel, Energy Transition, at Environmental Defense Fund.
Burçin Ünel is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. Burçin is an expert in utility regulation and environmental and energy policy, and she has authored over one hundred papers, policy briefs, public comments, and reports on numerous energy and environmental policy issues.
For over a century, state utility regulators across the country have worked hard to ensure that the entities they oversee deliver safe and adequate service at just and reasonable rates. That century saw the emergence of the interconnected energy system we rely on today, as well as a series of transformations in society, transportation, and technology, and multiple evolutions of utility governance.
Today, the climate crisis and resulting energy transition are upending settled beliefs about a range of energy-related practices and values — such as the benefits and costs of various energy sources, relationships between supply and demand, interactions among different infrastructure systems and fuels, and time horizons of interest for planning and analysis.
Utility regulators now face the challenge of ensuring that the energy utilities they oversee do their parts to effect the energy transition, while continuing to provide safe and adequate service at just and reasonable rates. Moreover, they need to accomplish all this while assuring fairer outcomes for communities that have in the past been persistently and disproportionately harmed by energy infrastructure decisions.