[Narrator]: This professor
has changed the way
we buy and sell electricity.
In 1992, the US Congress
passed legislation
that made the electricity
sector more competitive.
This marked a major shift
in how the industry was operating.
So Bill Hogan, a professor
at Harvard Kennedy School
created the Harvard Electricity
Policy Group, or HEPG.
HEPG convenes industry thought leaders
to discuss and analyze major issues
affecting the electricity sector
including climate change, clean energy,
and an evolving regulatory environment.
[Bill Hogan]: The conditions are that we meet
and we speak as a group
and conversations are not for attributions
so people can speak clearly
and don't have to worry about
that they're not representing
the positions of their organizations,
or something like that.
There are many organizations
which state that they are
consensus bulding organizations
that is not our purpose.
Our purpose is explicitly
to push the envelope
and to think about ideas
that are hard, and new, and different
and in different ways.
[Narrator]: Although HPEG does not take
positions or publish as a group
it has had an enormous impact
on the electricity industry.
[Bill Hogan]: Everyone thought that electricity
was going to be like natural gas
so we could just have
the same market structure
and design
that we had successfully
implemented for natural gas.
The core problem was
that you can't control the
flow of power through the grid.
Unlike in other markets
where if I sell apples, I'm
not affecting your apples
you can sell your apples.
But the problem is when I sell apples
in the electricity sector,
I'm also selling your apples.
and so this is going to be a problem.
We went through a long process
where various organized
markets in the United States
tried out models that seemed
simpler and more traditional
and the only ones that
didn't fail right away
were the ones that followed
the recommendations that I made
and it is now the case that
all of the organized markets
in the United States use
the same basic framework
and the framework
is the framework that was described first
in the first working papers
for the Harvard Electricity Policy Group.
[Narrator]:This year, Professor Hogan
will be stepping down from the
Raymond Plank Chair
but will continue his work
as a research professor.
