Do the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) promote the renewable electricity generation in the USA? Evidence from panel data econometric study

Olga Bespalova

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) is a widely implemented and discussed supply side state-level regulatory policy instrument aimed to promote generation of renewable energy. Existing literature on RPS developed from discussion of an appropriate policy design, its implementation on national versus state levels and factors driving states to adopt the policy to the analysis of its effectiveness and economic impact. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of the RPS on the share of renewable energy in electricity production and to quantify it using the panel data econometrics methods. Existing literature gives contradictory evidence of RPS policy impact on various measures of renewable energy production. It seems that binary RPS indicators (taking value of one if a policy is implemented and zero otherwise) are not good predictors since they do not take into account difference between regional policies, while RPS stringency variable had good explanatory power. In this paper, I propose to use RPS fractional goal as a proxy for RPS stringency, which is easily available and does not require difficult calculations. A set of control variables and econometric model are chosen in line with previous research.

Keywords: Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs); electric power industry; renewable energy policy; policy compliance; penalty; econometric modeling; microeconometric; panel data estimation; fixed effects; random effects. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C01 C23 C52 L52 O25 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05-06, Revised 2013-11-30
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in US Association for Energy Economics: Energy Dialogue 22.1(2014): pp. 1-12

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