EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Modeling a Clean Energy Standard for Electricity: Policy Design Implications for Emissions, Supply, Prices, and Regions

Anthony Paul (paul@rff.org), Karen Palmer and Matt Woerman
Additional contact information
Anthony Paul: Resources for the Future

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: The electricity sector is responsible for roughly 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and a shift away from conventional coal-fired generation is an important component of the U.S. strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Toward that goal, several proposals for a clean energy standard (CES) have been put forth, including one espoused by the Obama administration that calls for 80 percent clean electricty by 2035 phased in from current levels of roughly 40 percent. This paper looks at the effects of such a policy on CO2 emissions from the electricity sector, the mix of technologies used to supply electricity, electricity prices, and regional flows of clean energy credits. The CES leads to a 30 percent reduction in cumulative CO2 emissions between 2013 and 2035 and results in dramatic reductions in generation from conventional coal. The policy also results in fairly modest increases on national electricity prices, but this masks a wide variety of effects across regions.

Keywords: renewables; climate; clean energy standard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q42 Q48 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-07-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-11-35.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-11-35.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-11-35.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Modeling a clean energy standard for electricity: Policy design implications for emissions, supply, prices, and regions (2013) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-11-35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Resources for the Future (info@rff.org).

 
Page updated 2025-02-12
Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-11-35