While time-varying retail electricity pricing is very popular with economists, that support is not matched among regulators and consumers. Many papers have been written estimating and extolling the societal benefits of time-varying rates -- especially dynamic rates that change on a day's notice...

In many countries, unreliable inputs, particularly those lacking storage, can significantly limit a firm's productivity. In the case of an increasing frequency of blackouts, a firm may change factor shares in a number of ways. It may decide to self generate electricity, to purchase intermediate...

Federal and state policies in the U.S. subsidize electricity generation from 1.4 million rooftop solar arrays because of pollution avoidance benefits and grid congestion relief. Yet because these benefits vary across the U.S. according to solar irradiance, technologies of electricity generators,...

The standard approach to recovering the cost of electricity provision is to bill customers monthly for past consumption. If unable to pay, customers face disconnection, the utility loses revenue, and the service provision model is undermined. A possible solution to this problem is prepaid...

We examine the performance attributes of a merchant transmission investment framework that relies on market driven' transmission investment to provide the infrastructure to support competitive wholesale markets for electricity. Under a stringent set of assumptions, the merchant investment model...

In an unregulated electricity generation market, the degree to which generators in" different locations compete with one another depends on the capacity to transmit electricity" between the locations. We study the impact of transmission capacity on competition among" generators. We show that...

We analyze optimal policy when consumers of energy-using durables undervalue energy costs relative to their private optima. First, there is an Internality Dividend from Externality Taxes: aside from reducing externalities, they also offset distortions from underinvestment in energy efficiency....

Re-orienting current energy systems toward a far greater reliance on technologies with low or no carbon dioxide emissions is an immense challenge. At the broadest level the histories presented here are very much consistent with widely held views within the energy innovation policy literature. In...