Cost-effectiveness and Economic Incidence of a Clean Energy Standard

Bryan K. Mignone, Thomas Alfstad, Aaron Bergman, Kenneth Dubin, Richard Duke, Paul Friley, Andrew Martinez, Matthew Mowers, Karen Palmer, Anthony Paul, Sharon Showalter, Daniel Steinberg, Matt Woerman and Frances Wood

Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy, 2012, vol. Volume 1, issue Number 3

Abstract: A Clean Energy Standard (CES) is a flexible, market-based policy instrument that could be adopted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. electricity system over time. This paper uses several well-known energy system and electricity models to analyze a CES that reflects broad principles outlined in President Obama's January 2011 State of the Union Address and in the Administration's subsequent Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future. 1 In particular, it examines three different design options for a CES that would each lead to approximately 80% clean electricity by 2035. These different design options provide broadly similar economic incentives for clean energy deployment and yield similar overall welfare impacts, but they exhibit different distributional outcomes. The most inclusive CES crediting approach favors producers over consumers in competitive electricity markets as well as regions with larger initial endowments of clean energy. On the other hand, the most restrictive crediting approach favors consumers over producers and reduces preferences for regions with larger initial endowments of clean energy. While specific technology outcomes vary across the four models used in this study, key insights about cost-effectiveness and economic incidence are largely robust to the underlying modeling platform. These insights may be important considerations in future CES policy design efforts.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/eeeparticle.aspx?id=32 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
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:aen:eeepjl:1_3_a05

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/ ... ons/eeepjournal.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().