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Dan Cross-Call is a Principal with RMI’s Electricity Practice. He works on electric utility strategy and regulatory policy, as well as issues of renewable energy adoption and community energy strategy. In addition, Dan supports RMI’s Electricity Innovation Lab (e-Lab), a unique multi-year collaboration of leading industry actors to develop, implement, and spread new solutions to enable greater adoption of economic distributed energy resources. Dan joined RMI in 2013.
BACKGROUND
Prior to RMI, Dan worked as a consultant in the Energy practice of Charles River Associates in Boston. At CRA, he worked on a variety of electricity-related projects including energy and capacity market models for power plant valuations in U.S. Northeast markets, analysis of proposed legislation and regulatory rule changes, transmission development studies, and strategic planning for RTO wind integration. He has conducted studies of all of the major North American deregulated electricity markets, and performed modeling and research of European and Middle East electricity systems. Dan also supported corporate sustainability at CRA, directing the “Green Office Initiative” across more than a dozen offices worldwide.
At MIT, Dan was a researcher for the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Green Islands program, collaborating with university researchers and utility personnel in the US and Europe. His research focused on matching energy storage system design for renewable generation development and island electricity needs. He also organized a “Utility of the Future” panel at the annual MIT Energy Conference, convening utility and market experts to discuss models for electricity sector innovation. Previously, Dan managed renewable energy credit (REC) marketing programs with municipal utilities, and has conducted climate science field research in the Alaskan Arctic.
EDUCATION
Master of Science, Technology & Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013
Bachelor of Arts, Economics and Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College, 2005
LOCATION
Boulder, CO
Authored Works
Outlet Blog Post
Report Release: A Practical Guide to Navigating Utility Business Model Reform
Last week’s election brings a wave of new leadership across the country. Twenty states elected new governors, including at least three—in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico—who have suggested adopting 100 percent renewable energy portfolio standards. The composition of many state legislatures will also shift, and these…
insight
Navigating Utility Business Model Reform
Advancing efficient and equitable approaches to update the utility business model—motivated by emerging technological, policy, and market conditions in the electric power sector—is crucial to the grid’s transition to a more secure, clean, affordable, customer-centric system. Powerful trends are impacting the contours of the electric system, including growing policy…
Outlet Blog Post
RMI Recommends Actions and Process for Rate Design Reform in Ohio
Electricity rates are the signal by which the costs of power generation and delivery are translated to customers. Traditionally, costs are represented as rough averages across all hours, days, and seasons (as well as across locations and customers). Increasingly, time-based rates are being turned to for the opportunity to more…
insight
Reimagining the Utility
Electric utilities must modernize to serve new economic and policy objectives, including managing an increasingly distributed and decarbonized power system. A fundamental question for this future system is: What is the appropriate scope for utility functions (and associated earnings opportunities) versus those that should be provided by a competitive marketplace?…
Outlet Blog Post
Report Release: Reimagining the Utility to Bring “Utility of the Future” Debates Down to Earth
A lot of attention is given to the question: what is the right role and business model for electric utilities? This has become something like the energy industry’s version of what is the meaning of life, existential in nature and prone to as many answers as there are names on…
Outlet Blog Post
The Promise of Platform-based Grids
Platform business models have redefined the modern economy. From titans of personal computing and e-commerce like Apple and Amazon, to ubiquitous financial services that we use with hardly a second thought (think ATMs and credit cards), industries everywhere have reoriented from one-directional pipeline delivery systems to multisided platforms on which…
Outlet Blog Post
Design Matters: Unpacking Xcel’s Current Rates Proposal
Across the electricity system, utilities’ face a reckoning between traditional rate designs and disruptive trends. As distributed solar raises concerns about cost shifts onto a shrinking customer base, and DERs grow ever more capable, the electricity rates charged to customers are central to industry-wide efforts to rethink the utility business model.
Outlet Blog Post
Moving to Better Rate Design
Electricity stakeholders have long debated what makes for good rate design, but many of the new options offered are seriously flawed and, as a result, severely underperform against policy goals for system cost reduction, customer engagement, and environmental improvement. RMI has released a new report to help address these challenges.