Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Electricity Consumption written by Becka Brolinson and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the economics of electricity consumption in three essays.

Download or read book Optimal Pricing and Investment in Electricity Supply written by Ralph Turvey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1968, this book was one of the first full-scale published studies of the principles of investment planning and of the structure of marginal costs in a public enterprise. The concepts involved were more developed and applied in the world's electricity industries than elsewhere, and this book will be of interest to both engineers and administrators who are concerned with electricity supply, by setting out the characteristics of investment planning in this sector and the implications for cost analysis.

Download or read book Three Essays in Energy Economics written by Dae-Wook Kim and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Electricity Economics written by Ralph Turvey and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although economists have discussed for many years the merits of relating prices to the marginal or incremental costs of supply in electrical utilities, the idea of marginal cost pricing has yet to gain the confidence of the engineers, accountants, financial analysts, and administrators who run and regulate the industry. Many do not understand marginal cost pricing, and most hold notions about the aims and equity of tariffs that differ markedly from those of economists. This book applies economic analysis to electricity pricing in a practical way. It offers a number of case studies that analyze the structure of marginal costs and translate them into possible tariffs. The authors accept the importance of revenue requirements and of equity in tariff making, but they also stress the importance of efficient allocation of resources. Tariffs can, as this book demonstrates, invariably be made more efficient than they are at present while still satisfying both revenue requirements and equity considerations. The authors include a survey of the appraisal of rural electrification projects. They also examine optimal techniques for planning entire systems and provide a number of theoretical studies on pricing and investment including a discussion on risk and indivisibilities.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Competitive Electricity Market written by Williams Olayinka and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Energy and Development Economics written by Fiona Elizabeth Wilkes Burlig and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As demand for electricity grows around the world, so does the need for rigorous evaluation of energy policy interventions. In this dissertation, I use large datasets and modern econometric methods to study two such policies at scale - rural electrification in India and energy efficiency subsidies in California. I find that the benefits associated with these interventions are substantially smaller than previously thought, highlighting the importance of using new techniques for causal inference in these settings. In Chapter 1, I study the impacts of grid-scale rural electrification in India, using a regression discontinuity framework. In Chapter 2, I evaluate energy efficiency upgrades in K-12 schools in California using high-frequency data and novel machine learning methods. In Chapter 3, I develop methods to guide experimental design in the presence of panel data. In the first chapter, coauthored with Louis Preonas, we study the impacts of energy access in the developing world. Over 1 billion people still lack electricity access. Developing countries are investing billions of dollars in rural electrification, targeting economic growth and poverty reduction, despite limited empirical evidence. We estimate the effects of rural electrification on economic development in the context of India's national electrification program, which reached over 400,000 villages. We use a regression discontinuity design and high-resolution geospatial data to identify medium-run economic impacts of electrification. We find a substantial increase in electricity use, but reject effects larger than 0.26 standard deviations across numerous measures of economic development, suggesting that rural electrification may be less beneficial than previously thought. In the second chapter, coauthored with Christopher R. Knittel, David Rapson, Mar Reguant, and Catherine Wolfram, we study the impacts of energy efficiency investments at public K-12 schools in California. We leverage high frequency data -- electricity use every 15 minutes -- to develop several approaches to estimating counterfactual energy consumption in the absence of the efficiency investments. In particular, We use difference-in-differences approaches with rich sets of fixed effects. We show, however, that these estimates are sensitive to the set of fixed effects included and to the set of schools included as controls. To address these concerns, We develop and implement a novel machine learning approach to predict counterfactual energy consumption at treated schools and validate the approach with non-treated schools. We find that the energy efficiency projects in our sample reduce electricity consumption between 2 to 5% on average, which can result in substantial savings to schools. We also compare our estimates of the energy savings to ex ante engineering estimates. Realized savings are generally less than 50% of ex ante forecasts and quite low for measures other than heating and air-conditioning systems or lighting. In the third chapter, coauthored with Louis Preonas and Matt Woerman, we seek to answer: How should researchers design experiments with panel data? We derive analytical expressions for the variance of panel estimators under non-i.i.d. error structures, which inform power calculations in panel data settings. Using Monte Carlo simulation, data from a randomized experiment in China, and high-frequency U.S. electricity consumption data, we demonstrate that traditional methods produce experiments that are incorrectly powered with proper inference. Failing to account for serial correlation yields overpowered experiments in short panels and underpowered experiments in long panels. Our theoretical results enable us to achieve correctly powered experiments in both simulated and real data.

Download or read book Energy and Economic Myths written by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-05-18 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Energy and Economic Myths: Institutional and Analytical Economic Essays is a collection of materials that deal with various issues and concerns in economics. The title aims to clarify the misconception in economics. The first part of the text deals with the issues in natural resources and the economics of production. Next, the selection tackles the problems in institutional economics. Part III covers the epistemological and methodological concerns in economics. The title also talks about economic theories. The book will be of great interest to economists and readers who want to enhance their understanding of economic concepts.

Download or read book Essays in Environmental and Energy Economics written by Joshua Blonz and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation combines research on three topics in applied Energy and Environmental Economics related to the electricity industry. In the first paper, I study the economic welfare impact of an electricity pricing program that increases the price of electricity for small commercial and industrial customers when the cost of generation is high. The second paper explores an energy efficiency retrofit program that provides free upgrades to low-income households in California. Both of these policy interventions were a result of orders from the California Public Utilities Commission, the energy regulator in California. The final paper examines the cost of air quality regulations on employment in the coal mining sector in Appalachia. These three papers study different important aspects of the electricity sector, from upstream regulation of generation to end use pricing and consumption efficiency. In the first chapter, I study how in electricity markets, the price paid by retail customers during periods of peak demand is far below the cost of supply. This leads to overconsumption during peak periods, requiring the construction of excess generation capacity compared to first-best prices that adjust at short time intervals to reflect changing marginal cost. In this paper, I investigate a second-best policy designed to address this distortion, and compare its effectiveness to the first-best. The policy allows the electricity provider to raise retail price by a set amount (usually 3 to 5 times) during the afternoon hours of a limited number of summer days (usually 9 to 15). Using a quasi-experimental research design and high-frequency electricity consumption data, I test the extent to which small commercial and industrial establishments respond to this temporary increase in retail electricity prices. I find that establishments reduce their peak usage by 13.4% during peak hours. Using a model of capacity investment decisions, these reductions yield $154 million in welfare benefits, driven largely by reduced expenditures on power plant construction. I find the current policy provides of the first-best benefits but that, with improvements in targeting just the days with the highest demand, a modified peak pricing program could achieve 80% welfare gains relative to the first-best pricing policy. In the second chapter, I study energy efficiency retrofits programs, which are increasingly being used to both save on energy bills and as a carbon mitigation strategy. This paper evaluates the California Energy Savings Assistance program, which provides no-cost upgrades to low-income households across the state. I use quasi-experimental variation in program uptake to measure energy savings for a large portion of the treated population in the San Diego Gas & Electric service territory between 2007 and 2012. The results suggest that the overall program is ineffective at delivering energy savings and is not cost-effective. One challenge in implementing efficiency retrofit programs is that each upgrade must be customized to the housing unit on which it is installed. As a consequence, there is a wide range in efficiency upgrade potential across the population of candidate households. To better understand this heterogeneity in measure installation and its potential to drive program outcomes, I use discontinuities in program rules to identify key measure specific savings. This analysis shows that larger upgrades such as refrigerator replacements do provide cost-effective savings when considering the full set of social benefits. Households that do not receive larger upgrades generally see little or no savings. These results suggest that heterogeneity in upgrade potential can drive overall program outcomes when only a small portion of the treated population is eligible for cost-effective efficiency upgrades. In the third chapter, I study the costs of Title IV of the Clean Air Act. This regulation put a cap on sulfur emissions from electric power plants, which reduced the demand for high-sulfur coal. Using a quasi-experimental research design, I estimate how coal mine employment and production in high-sulfur coal-producing counties were impacted by the regulation by comparing them to neighboring counties that produced low-sulfur coal. I find that coal production dropped by 20% and coal sector employment dropped by 14%. I find no evidence of spillovers to employment or wages in the non-coal sectors of the high-sulfur coal counties. The results suggest that the coal sector employment costs of Title IV of the Clean Air Act are highly concentrated in the coal industry, and that the decline does not detectably impact the overall regional economy.

Download or read book Essays in Public Economics written by Scott W. Niemann and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Environmental and Energy Economics written by Zeyu Wang and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the household-level demand model for water and electricity, with the three chapters focusing on different aspects of the demand model. The first chapter, co-authored with my advisor, Frank Wolak, formulates and estimates a household-level, billing-cycle water demand model under increasing block prices that accounts for the impact of monthly weather variation, the amount of vegetation on the household's property, and customer-level heterogeneity in demand due to household demographics. The model utilizes US Census data on the distribution of household demographics in the utility's service territory to recover the impact of these factors on water demand. An index of the amount of vegetation on the household's property is obtained from NASA satellite data. The household-level demand models are used to compute the distribution of utility-level water demand and revenues for any possible price schedule. It can be used to design nonlinear pricing plans that achieve competing revenue or water conservation goals, which is crucial for water utilities to manage increasingly uncertain water availability yet still remain financially viable. Knowledge of how these demands differ across customers based on observable household characteristics can allow the utility to reduce the utility-wide revenue or sales risk it faces for any pricing plan. Knowledge of how the structure of demand varies across customers can be used to design personalized (based on observable household demographic characteristics) increasing block price schedules to further reduce the risk the utility faces on a system-wide basis. For the utilities considered, knowledge of the customer-level demographics that predict demand differences across households reduces the uncertainty in the utility's system-wide revenues from 22 to 84 percent. Further reductions in the uncertainty in the utility's system-wide revenues, in the range of 10 to 79 percent, are possible by re-designing the utility's nonlinear price schedules to minimize the revenue risk it faces given the distribution of household-level demand in its service territory. The second chapter, co-authored with Frank again, estimates a model of the household-level demand for electricity services such as lighting, heating and cooling, home appliances, and business use in the Indian state of Rajasthan using a combination of household-level survey data and administrative data. This model incorporates customer-level demographic characteristics, billing cycle-level weather variables, and the fact that households are subject to electricity outages and face increasing block price schedules for their electricity consumption. We estimate two versions of the model that differ in how the relationship between electricity use and consumption of each electricity service is modeled. The first model uses a shape-constrained kernel regression and the second model uses a customer-level constant elasticity of electricity consumption with respect to energy service model. Both energy service demand models produce estimates of the response of each of the above four categories of energy services to changes in the price of each energy service. Both versions of the model also produce estimates of the marginal willingness to pay for an additional hour of each of the four categories of energy services. The mean marginal willingness to pay across customers for an additional hour an energy service is the smallest for lighting and the largest for home appliance services. The third chapter studies whether consumers respond to increasing block tariffs. Although increasing block tariffs have been widely adopted by water and electricity utilities, some previous literature claims that consumers only respond to the average price, rather than the increasing block tariffs or the marginal price. In this chapter, we examine the empirical strategies proposed by previous literature, and test whether they are sufficient to conclude if consumers respond to the increasing block tariffs or other perceived prices. We utilize the household-level demand model in the first chapter that responds to the entire price schedule, including all price tiers and quantity cutoffs. We construct a dataset with consumption data simulated using this model. Applying empirical strategies proposed by previous literature to the simulated dataset fails to identify the underlying demand model, and still concludes that consumers respond to the average price. This suggests that current empirical evidences are not sufficient to exclude that consumers respond to the increasing block tariffs. Further investigations are needed to understand the water/electricity consumption decision.

Download or read book Three Essays on Energy Economics written by Louis Demetri Preonas and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electricity powers the modern economy, and the electricity supply chain is notoriously complex. Power plants must develop stable relationships for fuel procurement, as their long-run profitability hinges on securing a cheap, reliable fuel supply. Electric utilities may also lack the incentive to provide a reliable power supply to all potential customers, which could hamper economic productivity. The physical properties of electricity transmission create inherent challenges in providing power to all regions of the grid, while simultaneously incentivizing economically efficient production decisions. In this dissertation, I study three potential market failures in electricity supply: (i) market power in U.S. coal transportation; (ii) under-electrification of India’s rural poor; and (iii) short-run allocative inefficiencies in Indian electricity dispatch. In each case, my findings are of substantial economic importance due the scale of the electric power industry, which is essential to virtually all economic activity. Climate change only raises the stakes, and alleviating electricity market failures has the potential to increase carbon dioxide emissions and further harm the planet. In the first chapter, I investigate how market power in the transportation of coal might impact U.S. climate policies. Economists have widely endorsed pricing CO2 emissions to internalize climate change-related externalities. Doing so would significantly affect coal, which is the most carbon-intensive major energy source. However, U.S. coal markets exhibit an additional distortion, as the railroads that transport coal to power plants can exert market power. This upstream distortion can mute the price signal of a corrective tax, due to changes in markups or incomplete tax pass-through. I provide the first empirical estimates of how coal-by-rail markups respond to changes in coal demand. I find that rail carriers reduce coal markups when downstream power plant demand changes, due to a decrease in the price of natural gas (a competing fuel). I estimate markup changes that vary substantially across coal plants, resulting from a combination of heterogeneous transportation market structure and plant-specific demand shocks. Since low natural gas prices and a CO2 emissions tax similarly disadvantage coal, observed decreases in coal markups imply that pass-through of a federal carbon tax to coal power plants may be heterogeneous and incomplete. This could substantially erode the environmental benefits of a price-based climate policy. My results suggest that decreases in coal markups have increased recent climate damages by $2.3 billion, compared to a counterfactual where markups do not change. In the second chapter, coauthored with Fiona Burlig, we study the impacts of energy access in the developing world. Over 1 billion people still lack electricity access. Developing countries are investing billions of dollars in rural electrification, targeting economic growth and poverty reduction, despite limited empirical evidence. We estimate the effects of rural electrification on economic development in the context of India’s national electrification program, which reached over 400,000 villages. We use a regression discontinuity design and high-resolution geospatial data to identify medium-run economic impacts of electrification. We find a substantial increase in electricity use, but reject effects larger than 0.26 standard deviations across numerous measures of economic development, suggesting that rural electrification may be less beneficial than previously thought. In the third chapter, coauthored with Fiona Burlig and Akshaya Jha, we examine short-run allocative inefficiencies in Indian electricity supply. Electricity consumption is highly correlated with economic development. Understanding and resolving the drivers of economic inefficiencies in electricity markets is critical to supporting economic growth. We quantify the costs of short-run misallocation in Indian electricity supply. We assemble a novel dataset on daily production from each utility-scale power plant in the country and administrative measures of plant-specific marginal operating costs, and calculate the total variable costs of electricity generation in India to be approximately $29 billion per year. We next construct the “least-cost” counterfactual where we dispatch power plants in order of lowest-to-highest marginal cost. We find that this least-cost dispatch results in total annual operating costs that are roughly $4.7 billion lower than observed dispatch. Once we account for transmission constraints, we find a remaining misallocation wedge of $3.2 billion per year. We find evidence that this wedge results from market design and political economy considerations, but find little evidence of market power.

Download or read book Essays in Energy Economics written by Cecily Anna Spurlock and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation I explore two aspects of the economics of energy. The first focuses on consumer behavior, while the second focuses on market structure and firm behavior. In the first chapter, I demonstrate evidence of loss aversion in the behavior of households on two critical peak pricing experimental tariffs while participating in the California Statewide Pricing Pilot. I develop a model of loss aversion over electricity expenditure from which I derive two sets of testable predictions. First, I show that when there is a higher probability that a household is in the loss domain of their value function for the bill period, the more strongly they cut back peak consumption. Second, when prices are such that households are close to the kink in their value function - and would otherwise have expenditure skewed into the loss domain - I show evidence of disproportionate clustering at the kink. In essence this means that the occurrence of critical peak days did not only result in a reduction of peak consumption on that day, but also spilled over to further reduction of peak consumption on regular peak days for several weeks thereafter. This was similarly true when temperatures were high during high priced periods. This form of demand adjustment resulted in households experiencing bill-period expenditures equal to what they would have paid on the standard non-dynamic pricing tariff at a disproportionate rate. This higher number of bill periods with equal expenditure displaced bill periods in which they otherwise would have paid more than if they were on standard pricing. In the second chapter, I explore the effects of two simultaneous changes in minimum energy efficiency and Energy Star standards for clothes washers. Adapting the Mussa and Rosen (1978) and Ronnen (1991) second-degree price discrimination model, I demonstrate that clothes washer prices and menus adjusted to the new standards in patterns consistent with a market in which firms had been price discriminating. In particular, I show evidence of discontinuous price drops at the time the standards were imposed, driven largely by mid low efficiency segments of the market. The price discrimination model predicts this result. On the other hand, under perfect competition, prices should increase for these market segments. Additionally, new models proliferated in the highest efficiency market segment following the standard changes. Finally, I show that firms appeared to use different adaptation strategies at the two instances of the standards changing.

Download or read book Essays in Energy and Environmental Economics written by James Michael Gillan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The coming century will bring numerous environmental challenges and understanding the strategic decisions involved in energy production and consumption will be central to addressing them effectively. In this dissertation, I use methods from applied econometrics, behavioral economics, and industrial organization to investigate various lines of inquiry around this broader motivation. In Chapter 1, I study how residential electricity consumers respond to increasingly complicated incentives that are meant to improve allocative efficiency and test whether their behavior is consistent with standard models. In Chapter 2, I estimate the impact of temperature on high school students' standardized test performance in order to understand how environmental factors affect educational outcomes. In Chapter 3, I evaluate a targeting strategy meant to improve the efficiency of an electricity pricing program and develop a theoretical framework to ground the findings. The first chapter studies whether consumers are attentive to time-varying incentives to reduce electricity consumption. Dynamic pricing models typically assume that consumers respond to marginal incentives. I use a field experiment to assess the impact of dynamic pricing on residential electricity consumption and find strong evidence of inattention. I propose a model to interpret the results which suggests that the benefits of dynamic pricing may be substantively undermined by inattention. I also explore the role of automation in dynamic pricing, which holds the promise of reducing the cognitive choice frictions that cause inattention and lowering the effort cost of responding to price changes. I report three primary findings. First, households--both with and without automation--significantly respond to a short term price increase by reducing consumption. Second, responses are very insensitive to the size of the price change. A price increase of 31 percent causes consumption to fall by 12 percent on average, whereas a price increase of 1,875 percent causes an average reduction of 14 percent. Third, automation causes responses that are more than three times larger than the average effect, but are still insensitive to the price level. The results suggest that households use simplifying heuristics when facing dynamic prices and that automation reduces effort costs, but does not resolve inattention. I apply the model to recover bounds on the price elasticity of demand and shed light on the potential attention costs of dynamic pricing. The second chapter, coauthored with Maximilian Auffhammer and Catherine Wolfram, studies the impacts of extreme temperature on over 5 million students standardized test performance. We exploit plausibly exogenous year-to-year within-school daily weather variation in order to measure the contemporaneous effect of maximum outdoor temperature on aggregate student performance. The exam studied is the California High School Exit Exam, a state-wide standardized test that evaluates high school students' mathematics and English-language arts aptitude and was a requirement for receiving a diploma from 2006-2015. We document a nonlinear relationship between temperature and performance. Temperatures above 27.5$^\circ$C show statistically significant negative impact on pass rates in both subjects and scores in the math assessment. We also document heterogeneity in the effect by income in the area surrounding the school and find more pronounced effects for schools in the lowest income quartile. The third chapter, coauthored with Maximilian Balandat and Datong Zhou, evaluates the effect of targeting based on heterogeneous treatment effects using an experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for how various factors undermining external validity affect targeting and the how experimental evaluation of targeting can be used to parse competing mechanisms. Our theoretical framework distinguishes between group-level heterogeneity as defined by covariates and subject-level effects we call individual treatment effects (ITEs). ITEs can only be gleaned through observing program participation using panel data, but capture additional effect heterogeneity within the group-level effects. We partnered with a energy technology company in order to examine the impact using ITEs to target in the field. We find our targeting strategy reduces the costs of the partner by 52 percent and the results are highly significant. The strategy also reduces revenue by 24 percent, indicating an overall increase in profit on the order of 28 percent. We also examine the persistence of the effects and find the cost savings begin to diminish only 60 days after deployment of the targeting strategy. These findings suggest significant potential for reducing the cost of the program, but only in the short-term. Importantly, the experimental evaluation allows us to understand its performance without having to rely on the common practice of conducting ex-post simulations.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Energy Transition written by Gaurav Doshi (Ph.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the impact of energy policy on U.S. electricity markets and energy transition. The first chapter examines the impact of grid expansion on market power and emissions from fossil fuel firms in the short-run and the transition to wind energy in the long-run. For the empirical analysis, I use the rollout of a large-scale transmission expansion project in Texas that linked windy areas in the west to population centers in the east, costing $6.8 billion. Results show significant benefits due to declines in markups, emissions, and increases in wind investment. The payback periods range from 5 - 12 years and are much shorter than the previous estimates in the literature. In the second chapter, I study the effect of market structure on technology adoption in the U.S. solar and wind power industries. I compare adoption across two market types: restructured markets, which are designed to promote competition, and traditional markets, which are dominated by regulated monopolists. Solar projects in restructured markets are 24 percent less likely to adopt frontier technology, while the effect for wind projects is negative but statistically insignificant. I provide evidence that differences in financing costs across the two market types explain this negative relationship between competition and adoption. In the third chapter, I study the effect of transmission expansion on the cost of hedging risk in the wholesale electricity market. Market participants (generating firms, retailers, and financial traders) use forward contracts to hedge risk from price volatility in the market. I show that transmission integration in Texas significantly lowered the prices of these contracts, which translates to about $265 million worth of annual benefits in terms of lower cost of hedging risk. Further, I show evidence of greater market efficiency measured by the geographical convergence of prices across regions in Texas.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Efficiency and Equity of Energy Production and Consumption in the United States written by Amanda Jean Harker Steele and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the turn of the century, the way energy is produced and consumed across the United States has changed substantially. The objective of this dissertation is to provide an overview of the economic efficiency and distributional equity implications of changing the way energy is both produced and consumed. This work is outlined in three separate essays. The first essay entitled, "Gone with The Wind: Understanding the Impact of Intermittent Renewable Resources on Power System Reliability Across the United States," investigates if increasing the capacity of electricity generated by intermittent renewable resources affects the ability of electric utility companies across the United States to provide a reliable supply of power to their customers. Results suggest as the capacity of electricity generated by intermittent renewable resources increases, customers can expect to experience longer power system outages. The second essay, entitled "Estimating and Comparing Empirical Measures of Household Energy Insecurity," examines the extent to which different classification procedures used for identifying energy insecure households provide an accurate representation of what it means to be energy insecure in the United States. In this essay we compare and contrast five different approaches used for measuring household energy insecurity and propose one of these as a unique, conceptually and empirically strong, and preferred measure. Across the different measures, we find between 9 to 22% of households living in the U.S. identify as energy insecure. The third essay entitled, "Examining the Theoretical and Empirical Relationships Between Household Energy Efficiency and Security," develops a theoretical model and empirical procedure for examining how investing in energy efficiency affects household energy insecurity. We use our preferred measure of energy insecurity developed in the second essay to test our hypothesis that investing in energy efficiency has a significant negative effect on a household self-identifying as being energy insecure. The results of this essay indicate investing in energy efficiency decreases the likelihood that a household will become more energy insecure. This dissertation concludes in the last chapter with a brief summary and general conclusions from this research.

Download or read book Energy in a Competitive Market written by Colin Robinson and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a wide and fascinating selection of topics incorporating the whole spectrum of energy economics, this book examines the belief that markets are the key to the effective allocation of resources, a notion which arguably applies as much to energy as it does to any other commodity. In particular it focuses on several pertinent issues including: competition and regulation in gas and electricity; comparative efficiency analysis in electricity regulation; UK coal in competitive markets; vertical integration in the oil industry; cluster developments in the UK continental shelf; modelling underlying energy demand trends; and emissions targets, environmental Kuznets curves and incentive mechanisms.

Download or read book Three Essays on Resource Economics written by Weifeng Weng and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: