This paper reviews the impact of the shale gas revolution on the sectors of electricity generation, transportation, and manufacturing in the United States. Natural gas is being substituted for other fuels, particularly coal, in electricity generation, resulting in lower greenhouse gas emissions...

Energy efficiency resource standards (EERS) refer to policies that require utilities and other covered entities to achieve quantitative goals for reducing energy use by a certain year. EERS policies generally apply to electricity and natural gas sales and electricity peak demand, though they...

Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for 42 percent of all U.S. energy consumption and 41 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions. Engineering studies identify several investments in new enegy-efficiency equipment or building retrofits that would more than pay for themselves in terms of...

Residential buildings are responsible for approximately 20 percent of U.S. energy consumption, and single-family homes alone account for about 16 percent. Older homes are less energy efficient than newer ones, and although many experts have identified upgrades and improvements that can yield...

We analyze the evaluations of California energy-efficiency programs to assess the effectiveness of these evaluations in: 1) improving our understanding of their performance and 2) providing a check on utility incentives to overstate energy savings. We find that third-party evaluations are useful...

We look for evidence of capitalization of energy efficiency features in home prices using data from real estate multiple listing services (MLS) in three metropolitan areas: the Research Triangle region of North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon. These home listings include information...

The worldwide demand for new energy infrastructures has been paralleled in recent years by the increasing difficulty of siting major facilities. Siting difficulty is the subject of widespread discussion, but because of the complexity of the problem, potential solutions are not obvious or well...

In the mid-1990s, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was preparing to release Order 888 requiring open access to the transmission grid, the commission, environmental groups, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others, raised the question of how open access and greater...

Recent efforts to site renewable energy projects have provoked as much, if not more, opposition than conventional energy projects. Because renewable energy resources are often located in sensitive and isolated environments, such as pristine mountain ranges or coastal waters, siting these...

This paper investigates the value of recommendations for disseminating economic information, with a focus on frictions resulting from preference heterogeneity. We consider Bayesian expected-payoff maximizers who receive non-strategic recommendations by other consumers. The paper provides...