Why does Texas have its own power grid, and how can its history inform the future of electric power in the state? Nonresident scholar Julie Cohn looks beyond the mythology surrounding the standalone Texas grid and finds that reliability and economics — not politics — were the major factors leading to isolation.
With opposition to large-scale energy infrastructure on the rise, transmission service providers find it problematic to build the new power lines essential to a greener grid. This paper highlights the Texas Competitive Renewable Energy Zone initiative (CREZ) — a case study of the difficulties that new power lines face and the policy choices that can facilitate development of this necessary infrastructure. The CREZ experience can inform development of new large-scale transmission infrastructure in other regions.
Author Julie Cohn traces historical trends and experiences with the U.S. electrical grid to help frame choices as more renewables are brought into the system.
The invocation of sectarianism as a category of analysis for understanding the Middle East is misleading. It conflates a religious identification with a political one, and it ignores the kinship, class and national and regional networks within which sectarian self-expression has invariably been enmeshed. What is urgently needed is a new research agenda to study the dialectic — the complex, constant and unequal relationship between local and foreign — that makes up the modern Middle East.
