The electricity industry in the United States accounts for $250 billion in sales, and demand for electricity is increasing. The industry faces issues which make meeting that demand difficult. These issues include slow rates of technology adoption, a transmission system designed for an earlier era, a hybrid of regulated and deregulated jurisdictions, and incomplete markets.

The problems of the electricity industry are inherently interdisciplinary, and the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center (CEIC) has merged engineering, economics, risk analysis, decision science to study the problems facing us today.

Research Objectives

CEIC's primary research areas are as follows:

• Markets and Investment
• Distributed Energy Resources
• Advanced Generation, Transmission, and Environmental Issues
• Reliability and Security
• Demand Estimation

Recent publications that illustrate the interdisciplinary character of the CEIC research:

• Electricity Generation: Can It Be Sufficient and Green?
• Cascading Failures: Survival vs. Prevention
• Electric Gridlock: A National Solution
• Designing an Interdisciplinary Curriculum for the Changing Electric Power
• Improving Energy Infrastructure Security: Costs and Consequences
• Probabilistic Risk Analysis and Electricity Project Capital Structures
• A Multi-Channel Stakeholder Consultation Process for Energy Deregulation