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 Our Energy Future written by Don E. Albrecht and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rapid changes in energy production and consumption are having major socioeconomic implications for the communities of rural America. Technological developments in horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) nuclear energy, biofuels, wind and solar energy have significantly increased domestic energy production and the production of energy from renewable sources has encouraged energy efficiency. Yet, severe concerns persist and policy decisions on energy issues will have profound implications for all Americans and rural communities where consequences are experienced most directly. Thus, the time is appropriate for a careful exploration of the socioeconomic implications of our energy future. The purpose of this book is to present timely and scientifically sound information on energy policy, socioeconomic aspects of energy production and consumption with a focus on rural areas. The book presents the latest research by top scholars with the goal of clarifying options and providing the basis for informed policy decisions.
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 Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Download or read book Equity And Energy written by Mark N. Cooper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the energy price policies of the 1970s represented a major equity/efficiency trade-off and led to a dramatic decline in the living standard of lower income Americans, this book presents a comprehensive data-based assessment of the plight of lower income households between 1973 and 1983.
Download or read book Three Essays on Energy Efficiency and Climate Change written by Tsvetan Georgiev Tsvetanov and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Economic Growth Through Energy Efficiency written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Energy Production and Consumption in the United States written by C. F. Ellis and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Energy Environmental and Resource Economics written by Hyeongyul Roh and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Energy Economic Growth and Equity in the United States written by Narasimhan P. Kannan and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1979 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monograph on evaluations of effects of different energy policies on economic growth and economic disparity in the USA - using two simulation mathematical models, analyses energy-economic implications relating to income distribution, energy conservation and prices, investment and productivity, etc. Diagrams, flow charts, graphs, references and statistical tables.
Download or read book Three Essays on Energy Economics written by Wentao Zhang (Ph. D. in economics) and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter, I estimate the impacts of availability of public charging infrastructure on ownership and utilization of electric vehicles (EVs) across the populous U.S. metropolitan areas. I combine a dataset of vehicle ownership and self-reported annualized miles from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey with location data of charging stations. Employing Heckman selection model with instruments to tackle the endogeneity, my results show that the spatial availability of public charging stations has significantly positive effects on electric vehicle ownership and utilization through relieving "range anxiety". An increase of 10 public charging stations per 100 square miles raises the probability of EV ownership by 0.1% and enhances electric vehicle mile traveled by 30-40%.In the second chapter, I develop a conceptual framework and examine the factors driving household cooking fuel choice in recent China and the impacts of cooking fuel adoption on subjective well-being. I employ a large household-level panel dataset from five waves of China Family Panel Studies 2010-2018. Applying ordered choice models with random effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity, I find that household adoptions of clean and energy-efficiency cooking fuels are positively related to high economic status, good living conditions, high education attainment, and female household head. Using clean and modern cooking fuels significantly enhances peoples' life satisfaction and optimism for the future probably through reducing household air pollution and facilitating cooking work, particularly for the female and the elderly.In the third chapter, I estimate the impacts of energy subsidies on firm output and labor productivity in developing economics. I use a large firm-level dataset from World Bank Enterprise Surveys across a wide range of countries with estimated pre-tax and post-tax energy subsidies. After instrumenting for the potential endogeneity, I find that fossil fuel subsidies have overall significant negative effects on firm output and labor productivity. The negative effects of energy subsidies are smaller for small and medium-sized enterprises while become larger for energy-intensive manufacturing firms. My findings indicate that energy subsidies hurt firm performance probably through undermining the incentives of innovation and crowding out government expenditures on public goods.
Download or read book Three Essays on Energy Policies and Their Distributional Impacts written by Ensieh Shojaeddini and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Energy Economics and Technology written by Phillip G. LeBel and published by Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays in Energy Economics written by Jermaine A. Moulton and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Energy Economics written by Seth Wiggins and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
