Katie Dykes Shares Lessons on Building and Regulating a Modern Grid

Energy costs are a big consideration for voters in much of the US today as they head to the polls. But the decisions that shape those costs will ultimately fall on state regulators and policymakers, and will vary across different regions.

Today's episode turns to New England, which sits at the center of a shifting energy landscape. States there spent years focused on how fast they could decarbonize the region's power supply. Now the conversation is dominated by cost.

The challenges reflect deep-seated structural issues—the cost of aging infrastructure, transmission costs, and a regulatory system built for a different era. And they're colliding with a new wave of pressures: rising electrification, growing demand from EVs and heat pumps, and a resurgence in manufacturing.

Connecticut has spent more than a decade at the center of this shift, working to balance reliability, affordability, and decarbonization within a shared regional grid it doesn't fully control.

So are rising electricity prices a reflection not just of load growth but also structural problems in how the system is planned and regulated? Is New England's current electricity market structure capable of delivering this combination of affordability, reliability, and decarbonization the region needs? And what are the big energy policy lessons that other parts of the country can learn from New England's clean energy transition in recent years?

On today's episode, Bill Loveless digs into these questions with Katie Dykes, who was the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection from 2019 until this past summer. Before that, she chaired Connecticut's Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Earlier in her career, she worked at the US Department of Energy and the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Obama administration.

Credits: Hosted by Jason Bordoff, Bill Loveless, and Daniel Sternoff. Produced by Mary Catherine O'Connor, Dara Diamond, and Kyu Lee. Engineering by Gregory Vilfranc.