While other electrical engineers debate the large-scale blackouts that affect the grid every 35 years or so, Cornell Professors Robert Thomas, Richard Schuler, and other members of E3RG (Engineering and Economics of Electricity Research Group) concentrate on the dayto- day intersection of engineering and economics.

“Engineers worry about Kirkoff’s equations; economists don’t,” Thomas says, referring to the laws of physics that describe current and voltage.

A professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Thomas founded PSERC (Power Systems Engineering Research Center), a national affiliation of 11 universities supported by industry and the National Science Foundation. Schuler, a professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and in the Department of Economics, serves on the board of New York’s Independent System Operator, which controls the flow of electricity between generators and utilities and the deregulated wholesale power market. The group also includes professors in the Department of Applied Economics and Management.

Schuler’s insights from “experimental economics” have already helped, but Schuler emphasizes that the solution to the nation’s power grid needs requires long-term investments.

“Deregulation allows people to buy electricity at the best price even if power comes from a plant hundreds of miles away, but our transmission grid of high-voltage lines and substations was not intended to carry this kind of load,” he says. “They were designed instead to improve reliability by connecting alternative, nearby sources of supply.”