Effective and economical expansion of renewable energy is one of the most urgent and important challenges of addressing climate change. However, many countries are facing a problem because existing network infrastructures (i.e., transmission networks) were not originally built to accommodate...

Currently, most U.S. electricity consumers pay a constant price per kWh consumed that accounts for most of their bill. Ongoing developments in the power system increase efficiency gains that can be made from exposing consumers to widely varying wholesale spot prices. Pure spot pricing is not...

One concern with subsidies for low-carbon technologies is that they tend to go predominantly to high-income households. Previous research has shown, for example, that the top income quintile receives 60% of subsidies for rooftop solar and 90% of subsidies for electric vehicles. This paper finds...

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...

Economists, energy experts, and policymakers have called for accelerating investment in the U.S. electricity transmission network. Additional transmission lines could better integrate markets, reducing the total cost of electricity generation. They could also allow for the better integration of...

Many US states have set ambitious renewable portfolio standards (RPS) that require utilities to switch from fossil fuels toward renewables. RPS increases the renewables capacity, bond issuance, maturity, and yield spreads of investor-owned utilities compared to municipal producers that are...

Over the last two decades, U.S. households have received $47 billion in tax credits for buying heat pumps, solar panels, electric vehicles, and other "clean energy" technologies. Using information from tax returns, we show that these tax credits have gone predominantly to higher-income...

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,...

Environmental policy is increasingly concerned with measuring emissions resulting from local changes to electricity consumption. These marginal emissions are challenging to measure because electricity grids encompass multiple locations and the information available to identify the effect of each...

The costs of low-carbon energy fell dramatically over the past decade, leading to rapid growth in its deployment. However, many challenges remain to deploy low-carbon energy at a scale necessary to meet net zero carbon emission targets. If net zero goals are to be met, developing complementary...