Generating electricity from renewable sources is more expensive than conventional approaches, but reduces pollution externalities. Analyzing the tradeoff is much more challenging than often presumed, because the value of electricity is extremely dependent on the time and location at which it is...

Government subsidies have driven rapid growth in U.S. wind and solar generation. Using data on hourly outputs and prices for 25 wind and nine solar generating plants, some results of those subsidies are studied in detail: the value of these plants' outputs, the variability of output at plant and...

This paper examines the choice between subsidizing investment or output to promote socially desirable production. We exploit a natural experiment in which wind farm developers could choose an investment or an output subsidy to estimate the impact of these policy instruments on productivity....

The increasing importance of intermittent renewable energy sources suggests a growing importance for energy storage as a way of smoothing the variable output. In this paper I investigate factors affecting the amount of energy storage needed, including the degree of intermittency and the...

Hourly plant-level wind and solar generation output and real-time price data for one year from the California ISO control area is used to estimate the vector of means and the contemporaneous covariance matrix of hourly output and revenues across all wind and solar locations in the state. Annual...

This paper specifies a new convenient algorithm to construct policy projections conditional on alternative anticipated policy-rate paths in linearized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, such as Ramses, the Riksbank's main DSGE model. Such projections with anticipated...

This paper explores the application of oblivious equilibrium to concentrated industries. We define an extended notion of oblivious equilibrium that we call partially oblivious equilibrium (POE) that allows for there to be a set of "dominant firms'', whose firm states are always monitored by...

Greater use of renewable energy is seen as a key component of any move to combat climate change, and is being aggressively promoted as such by the new U.S. administration and by other governments. Yet there is little economic analysis of renewable energy. This paper surveys what is written and...

We examine the effect of in-state and out-of-state renewable energy policies on wind energy patenting. Using a semiparametric fixed-effects Tobit model, we regress patent counts on a series of policy variables within a state and a spatially weighted average for each of these policies implemented...

Policies supporting investment in renewable electricity have been a cornerstone of climate policy in many parts of the world. While previous empirical work explores the economic and environmental impacts of renewable production, the focus has exclusively been on the short-run impacts of...