p064 Legacies of Electric Restructuring for A New Electric Transition: Neoliberal Paths for Canadian Hydropower
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current transition in our electric systems away from fossil fuels is shaped by a previous electric system transition, electric restructuring. Can the neoliberal tools we built some two decades ago--and the regulatory remnants and responses--achieve the deep environmental and social change we now seek? This article analyzes the institutional, political-economic, and geographical effects and legacies of electric restructuring, focusing on Massachusetts and New England. It analyzes five realms of change: (a) generation; (b) transmission; (c) distribution and retail supply; (d) regional wholesale markets; and (e) deregulation of electric utility corporate structure. It shows how the legacies of these changes shape Massachusetts's approach. to importing Hydro-Québec power. Today's main market tools in the electric sector are inadequate to fund long-distance transmission in the United States, as investors cannot tolerate the high financial risk. Massachusetts's approach to importing Québec hydropower unfolded in four steps: 1) the 2016 Energy Diversity Act; (2) a Request for Proposals to fund a transmission line through northern New England; (3) the selection of a winning proposal, and 4) the addition of clean energy credits to the state renewable portfolio standard. These put the cost of a new line onto Massachusetts's electric customers, guaranteed profits to the transmission owner and the state's still-regulated utilities, and offered multiple income streams to Hydro-Québec. The proposal competition favored projects that externalized costs onto other people and places, and into the future--leading to political opposition, escalating costs, and implementation delay. This history helps reveal key legacies and limits of electric restructuring and its role in decarbonization as well as wider sustainability and justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".