Meet Joshua Macey, Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School
Written by: Bella Garcia, YC '26, and Emily Khym, YC '27
Joshua Macey is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His research focuses on electricity, transmission policy, grid reliability, and climate. The CBEY Clean Energy Forum had the chance to hear from Macey about his research and thoughts on energy law.
How did you become interested in environmental and energy law?
I didn’t study environmental issues as an undergraduate. When I got to law school, I had a finance background and a general interest in environmental issues, but I hadn’t focused on them. I had a close friend, also with a finance background, who was deeply interested in this space, and we ended up writing two papers together.
It turned out that many of the most important climate challenges are questions of market design—how to structure markets to both maintain reliability and accommodate high levels of renewables. Environmental legal scholarship used to focus on penalizing firms that pollute—on disciplining bad and risky actors—and that’s still essential, but you can’t decarbonize cost-effectively without thinking about how to get the right resources onto the grid. That’s much more similar to what financial regulators do in trying to design safe and sound markets.
We also have an outdated utility model that has become one of the greatest impediments to decarbonization. It’s a fascinating corporate law issue and one that needs to evolve for the energy transition to succeed.
What research are you currently working on, and what classes do you teach at Yale Law School?
This spring, I’m teaching Energy Law and an advanced Energy Law Seminar. The lecture course covers how we regulate the grid, while the seminar, co-taught with the former FERC General Counsel, focuses on current issues in electricity markets.
My current research includes several projects. One examines why grid governance looks the way it does. Incumbent utilities, which controlled most parts of the electric grid in the 20th century, still write or play an influential role in writing the rules for reliability and transmission, often in ways that favor themselves. I’m exploring that dynamic in detail. Another project looks at the tension between public utility regulation, which grants legal monopolies, and antitrust law, which prohibits them. I’m trying to theorize when antitrust should be used to address monopoly utilities that engage in self-preferencing and how that could work under current law.
I’m also writing several projects on resource adequacy markets. Essentially, how we compensate resources for being available to deliver power when needed. These markets are often poorly designed, overpaying resources that don’t actually enhance reliability and often favors certain types of resources—especially gas—by compensating them for being available even when they’re not. I’m interested in how to better align these incentives.
Finally, I’m studying how bankruptcy law interacts with environmental liabilities in the coal and gas sectors, what I call the too liable to regulate problem.
If you could redesign U.S. electricity market policy, what would you change?
There’s a lot that should change, both substantively and in terms of governance. The lowest-hanging fruit is transmission.
First, I would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission eminent domain authority for transmission projects, similar to what it has for natural gas pipelines. This would help overcome collective action problems and make it easier to build critical infrastructure.
Second, we know where congestion exists and where no-regrets transmission should be built. Rather than leaving this to regional grid operators who face multiple veto points from incumbents, FERC or the Department of Energy could directly solicit bids and authorize construction of key transmission lines with cost recovery and eminent domain powers.
Third, I would fix the interconnection queue. Right now, generators can wait five to seven years to connect to the grid. I would expand connect and manage approaches that allow generators to come online quickly if they accept curtailment risk or are willing to forego capacity market payments. We could also auction interconnection positions to prioritize resources that provide the most value, such as those receiving state subsidies or offering important reliability services.
Beyond that, I would reform resource adequacy markets to pay resources only when they actually deliver energy and to impose meaningful penalties for failing to do so. I’d also revisit RTO governance to give states or FERC more oversight and to curb incumbent transmission owners’ influence.
Finally, I would require full corporate unbundling: utilities that own transmission should not also own generation. Vertical integration creates clear conflicts of interest, as seen when utilities block transmission that could lower their generation revenues.
What has been the most impactful clean energy policy in recent years?
One of the Biden administration’s shortcomings was not prioritizing transmission. If even a fraction of the subsidies provided to wind and solar through tax credits had gone to transmission, we could have integrated far more clean energy resources.
That said, two high-impact strategies stand out. First, the administration did provide important support for transmission lines, and second, it supported emerging but not-yet-economic clean technologies through industrial policy. Subsidies for early-stage technologies such as advanced geothermal, grid-enhancing tech, distributed resources, small modular reactors help make them commercially viable.
The federal government can play a critical seed-funding role, as it did historically with vaccines and nuclear power. Consistency across administrations remains a challenge, but targeted federal support for transmission and innovation remains essential.
Which of your papers would you recommend to students interested in energy law and markets?
For those interested in public utility regulation, The Corporate Governance of Public Utilities is a good starting point. For lawyers interested in jurisdiction, Long Live the Federal Power Act’s Bright Line offers a deep dive into core electricity and gas doctrines. If you’re focused on reliability markets, Private Risk and Social Resilience in Liberalized Electricity Markets talks about why resource adequacy mechanisms often fail. For accessible overviews of many challenges currently facing electricity regulators, Grid Reliability in the Electric Era and Grid Reliability Through Clean Energy are both approachable introductions to the field.
What’s a common misconception about energy law?
Many people think we’ve transitioned to a competitive electricity market. While competition has increased, electricity remains one of the most regulated sectors of the economy because state federal regulators still set many prices and rules in elaborate administrative proceedings.
Ironically, many self-described pro-market energy executives operate within highly administrative systems. Yet, competition has been enormously valuable in lowering costs and emissions. Moving away from the legacy utility model and toward competitive structures is critical for both affordability and decarbonization.
What advice would you give to students pursuing a career in energy law?
Develop a strong technical foundation. It’s tempting to go straight into advocacy organizations like NRDC, Earthjustice, or the Sierra Club, and those are great paths, but much of the essential work happens at FERC, state public utility commissions, utilities, grid operators, and independent power producers.
Working inside the industry or with regulators gives you invaluable technical experience. Whether your background is in law, engineering, or finance, hard skills are crucial in this field because energy law is deeply technical. The more you understand the system’s mechanics, the more effective you’ll be at shaping it.