The phasedown of coal for electricity generation is considered vital to meeting global climate targets. Many countries have pledged to stop using coal, with some as early as 2030. While the United States has no target currently in place, several states do. In this paper, we examine the...

Economic policies often involve dynamic interventions, where individuals receive repeated interventions over multiple periods. This dynamics makes past responses informative to predict future responses and ultimate outcomes depend on the history of interventions. Despite these phenomena,...

Recent energy shortfalls in renewables-dominated electricity markets call for a mechanism to ensure demand is met under all system conditions. We demonstrate severe shortcomings of an increasingly popular mechanism--reliability options--caused by its interaction with fixed-price forward...

Advocates in several countries have promoted a "green recovery" from the pandemic, with an emphasis on measures to address climate objectives. We evaluate proposals for the United States and find that as stated, ambitious plans to further cut emissions from transportation and electricity will...

The practice of standardizing the designation of time is a central device for coordinating activities and economic behaviors across individuals. However, there is nearly always conflict between an individual's goals of coordinating activities with others and engaging in those activities at their...

Access to electricity is a crucial determinant of quality of life and productivity. The United States has a highly reliable electricity grid but it faces new resilience challenges posed by more intense natural disasters and rising state level green power requirements. Using a U.S electric...

Electrification is a centerpiece of global decarbonization efforts. Yet there are reasons to be skeptical of the inevitability, or at least the optimal pace, of the transition. We discuss several under-appreciated costs of full, or even deep, electrification. Consumer preferences can operate in...

If further decarbonization of electricity systems is to continue, a next generation of innovation in transformative grid modernization and renewables integration technologies will be needed. Few studies have investigated the policy determinants of innovation in this sector to glean insights on...

We provide a spatial theory of clean growth to assess the global impact of the rise of renewable energy. We model the details of the combined production and transmission network of electricity ("the grid") that determine the supply and losses of energy in space. The local rate of clean energy...

We study how individual inventors respond to incentives to work on "clean" electricity technologies. Using natural gas price variation, we estimate output and entry elasticities of inventors and measure the medium-term impacts of a price increase mirroring the social cost of carbon. We find that...