Lynne Kiesling is an economist focusing on regulation, market design, and the economics of digitization in the electricity industry. She is Director of the Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics in the Center on Law, Business, and Economics, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Master of Science in Energy and Sustainability program, both at Northwestern University. She is also a Research Professor at University of Colorado Denver. Her academic background includes a B.S. in Economics from Miami University (Ohio) and a Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University.
Lynne’s academic interests have long been focused on technology, the economic history of technological change, and how regulation and other institutions shape incentives to innovate. Her academic publications include Deregulation, Innovation, and Market Liberalization: Electricity Restructuring in a Constantly Evolving Environment (Routledge, 2008) and journal articles and book chapters on competition, market design, and the important role that market prices play as communication mechanisms in complex, decentralized networks. More recently, she and co-authors analyzed incomplete markets in risk in ERCOT in light of the 2021 Winter Storm Uri outages in “Private Risk and Social Resilience in Liberalized Electricity Markets,” Joule (2022), and she and Stephen Littlechild used a decentralized market process framework to analyze policy responses to Winter Storm Uri and recommend alternatives in “Hayek and the Texas Blackout,” Electricity Journal (2021).
Lynne has also contributed to the development of transactive energy systems since collaborating on the GridWise Olympic Peninsula Testbed Demonstration Project in 2006-2007. She is currently working in collaboration with David Chassin (SLAC National Laboratory, Stanford University) and Post Road Foundation on a U.S. Department of Energy Connected Communities research grant to test transactive energy in rural communities.
In addition to her academic research, Lynne is currently a member of the U.S. Department of Energy's Electricity Advisory Committee, which provides advice to DOE on modernizing electricity infrastructure. She has also served as a member of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's Smart Grid Advisory Committee, and was a member of the GridWise Architecture Council 2005-2010, where she remains an emerita member.
