Research Article The Political Complexity of Regional Electricity Policy Formation Kyungjin Yoo 1 and Seth Blumsack 1,2 1 John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, USA 2 Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Seth Blumsack; sab51@psu.edu Received 18 May 2018; Revised 9 October 2018; Accepted 8 November 2018; Published 5 December 2018 Guest Editor: Miguel Fuentes Copyright © 2018 Kyungjin Yoo and Seth Blumsack. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Te integration of renewable power supplies into existing electrical grids, or other major technology transitions in electric power, is a complex sociotechnical process. While the technical challenges are well-understood, the process of adapting electricity policy and market rules to these new technologies is understudied. Planning and market rules are a critical determinant of the technical success of renewable energy integration eforts and the fnancial viability of renewable energy investments. Organizational adaptation can be particularly complex in electric power, where transmission grids cross multiple political boundaries and decisions are made not by central authorities or governments, but in cooperative regional frameworks that must accommodate many divergent interests. We add to a recently emerging literature on the governance of regional organizations that plan and operate electric power grids by developing and illustrating a novel approach to the study of political power in multistakeholder electricity organizations. We use semistructured interviews with participants in a specifc regional electric grid authority, the PJM Regional Transmission Operator in the Mid-Atlantic United States, to elicit perceptions of where tensions arise in stakeholder-driven processes for changing PJM’s rules and perceptions of those groups of stakeholders that possess political power. We treat these perceptions as hypotheses that can be evaluated empirically using fve years of data from PJM on how stakeholders voted on a wide variety of regional electricity policy issues. Representing voting behavior as a network, we use a community detection method to identify strong coalitions of stakeholders in PJM that provide support for some stakeholder perceptions of political power and refute other perceptions. Te degree distribution of the voting network exhibits a fat tail relative to those in other canonical graph models. We show, using relatively simple network metrics including degree, betweenness, and the mixing parameter, that the reason for this fat tail in the degree distribution is the existence of “swing” voters in RTO stakeholder networks. Tese voters are identifable in the tail of the degree distribution of the voting network and are infuential in pushing highly contentious rule change proposals towards passage or failure. Te method we develop is generalizable to other contexts and provides a new framework for the study of regional electricity policy formation. 1. Introduction As large-scale electric power systems undergo various types of technological transition, including the integration of large amounts of renewable power generation and an increase in adoption of distributed power generation and electrifcation of transportation, the rules that govern markets, planning, and operations of the power grid need to adapt along with technology [1–6]. Tese rules are important for determining the value of technology options that explicitly or implicitly compete to provide electric generation and transmission services [7]. Te challenges in integrating weather-dependent wind and solar power into regional electric grids have provided some recent examples of how grid operators have needed to adapt their rules, especially when those grid operators span multiple political jurisdictions (e.g., regional grid operators covering all or parts of several states in the United States or coalitions of national grid operators in Europe). In the United States, grid operators have adapted to rapid growth in wind energy by changing market and Hindawi Complexity Volume 2018, Article ID 3493492, 18 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/3493492