The growing "electrify everything" movement aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by transitioning households and firms away from natural gas toward electricity. This paper considers what this transition means for the customers who are left behind. Like most natural monopolies, natural gas...

Since 2005, the Chinese government has engaged in an ambitious effort to move China's energy system away from coal and towards more environmentally friendly sources of energy. However, China's investment in coal power has accelerated sharply in recent years, raising concerns of massive...

On Aug. 8, 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (PL 109-58). This was the first major piece of energy legislation enacted since 1992 following five years of Congressional efforts to pass energy legislation. Among other things, the law contains tax incentives worth over $14...

We study the electricity consumption of San Diego-area households following a series of price changes and related events during California's energy crisis in 2000-01. The analysis uses a five-year panel of disaggregate billing and weather data for a random sample of 70,000 households. In...

This paper discusses the political, regulatory and economic factors that led to California's electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001. It begins with a discussion of the origins of California's electricity restructuring and competition programs. It then discusses the structure of the wholesale and...

This paper presents estimates of the customer-level demand for electricity by industrial and commercial customers purchasing electricity according to the half-hourly energy prices from the England and Wales (E&W) electricity market. These customers also face the possibility of a demand charge on...

I generalize a benchmark model of directed technical change in order to reconcile it with the historical experience of energy transitions. I show that the economy becomes increasingly locked-in to the dominant sector when machines and energy resources are substitutes, but a transition away from...

Addressing climate change requires transitioning away from coal-based energy. Recent structural change models demonstrate that temporary interventions could induce permanent fuel switching when transitional dynamics exhibit strong path dependence. Exploiting changes in local coal supply driven...

This paper assesses trends in the global energy sector through 2040 by harmonizing multiple projections issued by private, government, and inter-governmental organizations based on methods from "Global Energy Outlooks Comparison: Methods and Challenges" (Newell and Qian 2015). These projections...

Energy security is the ability of households, businesses, and government to accommodate disruptions in supply in energy markets. This survey considers the economic dimensions of energy security, political and other non-economic security concerns and discusses policy approaches that could enhance...