David J. Hurlbut
Multistate Decision Making for Renewable Energy and Transmission: An Overview

Today’s electricity sector needs to do more than just keep the lights on.  It needs to meet renewable energy goals, reduce carbon emissions, minimize the impact that new facilities have on sensitive habitat, and encourage customers to use energy more efficiently.  Even utilities’ traditional charge of maintaining reliability is becoming more complex because the ever-growing physical ties between utility service areas make wholesale power markets more electrically interdependent.  The articles that constitute this special issue of the University of Colorado Law Review provide a rich intellectual foundation for revisiting how utility law can accommodate issues that transcend the purview of a single state.  The articles were introduced as part of the legal symposium “Multistate Decision Making for Renewable Energy and Transmission,” organized by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (“NREL”) and the U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) in collaboration with state utility commissioners from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.  In the introductory piece, David J. Hurlbut lays groundwork for the subsequent articles that arose out of the conference.