EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The sources of emission reductions: evidence from U.S. SO2 emissions from 1985 through 2002

A. Denny Ellerman () and Florence Dubroeucq
Additional contact information
A. Denny Ellerman: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Florence Dubroeucq: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A chapter in Emissions Trading and Business, 2006, pp 327-352 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract An enduring issue in environmental regulation is whether to clean up existing “old” plants or in some manner to bring in new “clean” plants to replace the old. In this paper, a unit-level data base of emissions by nearly 2000 electric generating units from 1985 through 2002 is used to analyze the contribution of these two factors in accomplishing the significant reduction of sulphur dioxide emissions from these sources in the United States. The effect on SO2 emissions of the new naturalgas-fired, combined-cycle capacity that has been introduced since 1998 is also examined. The results indicate that cleaning up the old plants has made by far the greatest contribution to reducing SO2 emissions, and that this contribution has been especially large since the introduction of the SO2 cap-and-trade program in 1995. The new natural-gas-fired, combined cycle units have displaced conventional generation that would have emitted about 800.000 tons of SO2; however, the effect has not been to reduce total SO2 emissions since the 9.0 million ton cap is unchanged, but to reduce the quantity of abatement required of other units in meeting the cap and thereby the cost of doing so.

Keywords: US SO2 emission reductions; electricity generation; combined cycle generation; clean aircraft; effectiveness of cleaning up vs. replacing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:sprchp:978-3-7908-1748-5_22

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783790817485

DOI: 10.1007/3-7908-1748-1_22

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-02
Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-7908-1748-5_22