Can E-learning Help Regulators Better Adapt to a Changing Energy Landscape?
It is the second day of a massive heat wave. Across the region, thermostats are cranked, air conditioners are laboring, and wind turbines have gone still. Without warning, a summer storm moves in, and the solar generation energy markets were counting on vanishes behind clouds. The heat saps the efficiency of conventional generators too, and blackouts begin rolling through neighborhoods. People look up from their phones, annoyed and sweating, and wonder: Why isn't there enough power? Can't they just make more?
These seem like simple questions, but the answers can be extraordinarily complicated in a modern energy market. Maybe there was enough power in a neighboring state, but market rules didn’t incentivize that power to be delivered over the regional transmission network to where it was most needed. Maybe generators were hesitant to turn on existing power plants because they weren’t sure they could earn back their startup costs. Or maybe the market didn’t encourage generators to build enough power plants in the first place. The people who have to unravel these sticky questions are the energy regulators whose job it is to keep the lights on for all of us.
While scenes similar to our imagined heat wave play out in real control rooms across the world, scenes just like it also happen inside animated e-learning modules created by a team at Stanford's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) led by Frank Wolak, the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Department of Economics at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, and Mark Thurber, Associate Director and Social Science Research Scholar at PESD, which is part of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The library of modules feature a beleaguered cartoon CEO who just wants to deliver returns for her shareholders and a regulator who keeps getting bad news (sometimes of his own making). The on-screen stakes are fictional, but the scenarios they depict are drawn directly from real events: the kinds of market design failures that have contributed to blackouts in California, in Texas, and in grids around the world as they struggle to absorb the surge of intermittent wind and solar.
Thirty years ago, over 50 percent of U.S. electricity came from coal, and almost everywhere, a single vertically integrated utility owned the power plants, the transmission lines, and the customer relationship. Regulating electricity basically meant auditing costs and setting rates. Today, competitive markets have replaced monopolies in many regions, wind and solar have surged to roughly 20 percent of the national electricity supply, and AI data centers are adding demand at a pace no one anticipated. The old playbook no longer applies, and regulators need help to adapt.
“Our e-learning modules are designed to give regulators, and those who support them, the basic conceptual underpinnings they need to do their jobs more effectively in this new energy landscape,” says Thurber. It's a challenge that's only grown more urgent as the grid has grown more complex.
Learning by Doing
For more than a decade, the PESD team has run game-based electricity market trainings for regulators, in-person workshops where participants take on the roles of generators and learn from the consequences of their bids. With support from Stanford Impact Labs, the team at PESD has translated that experience into eight interactive e-learning modules on how day-ahead and real-time markets function, and how renewable energy changes the calculus, using animated scenarios and decision-making exercises that offer participants immediate feedback. Since 2023, energy regulators and regulatory staff have notched approximately 2,000 module completions — in California, in other states and provinces across North America, and in countries around the world including Australia, the Philippines, Chile, France, Ghana, and many more.
Heather Moline, an energy policy advisor at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, engaged with the modules at the invitation of the Western Interstate Energy Board (WIEB), which partnered with PESD to get the e-learning resources out to regulators in the North American West. “The e-learning modules helped me understand the role of a diverse resource mix and the role of markets in ensuring our region can meet load demand,” Moline said. “Understanding how factors like transmission constraints, generator types, and market pricing work together has helped me have more informed discussions with our commissioners. Plus, the self-paced virtual format made it far more accessible than an in-person training, and honestly I think it's more effective."
The reach of PESD’s e-learning initiative is expanding well beyond the North American West. Dominic Kemei, an electrical engineer at the Strathmore University Energy Research Centre in Nairobi, encountered the modules through the African School of Regulation. As Kenya begins weighing a shift from its current feed-in tariff system toward energy auctions and open markets, the modules made abstract concepts tangible in ways his earlier studies hadn't. “I clicked and clicked and clicked to make my decisions and immediately understood the consequences,” he said of working through an electricity market bidding exercise. “The training helped me understand the basics of advanced energy markets, including the pitfalls, and that will be helpful as Kenya talks about making that shift.”
A Question of Scale
Thurber is careful to describe the modules as non-dogmatic. The goal is not to advocate for any particular policy outcome. Wind and solar are growing, regardless of anyone's preferences, and the modules simply describe how that changes the market environment. “You can feel how you want about renewable energy,” Thurber says, “but you're not going to change the fact that it's a large and growing part of the energy mix.” With a goal of supporting adaptation to that changing energy world, PESD leveraged SIL funding to develop a resource able to bring together regulators from politically different jurisdictions around shared technical and market concepts, without the conversation devolving into ideology.
The current pilot, the “100 regulators initiative,” is the team's first e-learning-only effort: 83 regulatory staff across western states and provinces have enrolled to date, working through modules independently and offering feedback. That feedback has been highly positive thus far, suggesting the e-learning resources are indeed helping fill a crucial gap. Just as valuable was feedback revealing that one module was too difficult, its concepts not yet made accessible enough to a general audience. This has spurred the PESD team to begin developing an improved version that draws on teaching techniques that are proving effective in other modules.
How to grow the program’s reach is the central question the team is now grappling with. The partnership with the Western Interstate Energy Board demonstrates one possible model, in which an umbrella organization like WIEB offers access to a cohort of members. Foundation funding might help expand e-learning access in key emerging economies planning to transition to wholesale electricity markets, such as Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya. And in the longer term, PESD hopes to develop a web portal that would allow individual users to sign up for the e-learning library directly.
“Markets are like fire,” Thurber says. “They can heat your house, but they can also burn it down.” For regulators stepping into an era reshaped by renewable energy sources, data centers, and political whiplash, the difference often comes down to whether they understand what they're working with.