To decarbonize the power sector policy-makers need to commit to long-term credible rules for climate and energy policy. Otherwise, time-inconsistent policy-making will impair investments into low-carbon technologies. However, the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to...

There is a broad agreement that renewable energy sources (RES) will play an important role to abate CO₂ emissions but there is a contentious debate about the economic sense to promote RES via subsidies. Many static analyses conclude that subsidizing RES ties up capital which could have been...

China has realized that for its own sake and from the international community’s perspective, it cannot afford to continue along the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment. Accordingly, the country has placed ecological goals at the same level of...

This doctoral thesis, organized in three self-contained chapters, provides an analysis of the economic effects associated with the extraction of natural resources and the transition from an economy based on fossil fuel use to an economy relying primarily on renewable energy sources. Chapter 1...

Negative environmental externalities associated with wind power plants depend on the physical characteristics of turbine installations and associated power lines and the geographical siting. We derive analytically an environmental taxation scheme for achieving the efficient spatial distribution...

An argument sometimes used to support renewable energy is that it may contribute to job creation. On the other hand, these technologies often face local opposition. On the case of Denmark, the country with the longest experience with wind power, the authors examine whether the installation of...

We study the optimal design of spatially-differentiated subsidies for residential solar panels. We build a structural model of solar panel demand and electricity production across the US and estimate the model by combining 1) remotely sensed data on residential solar panels, 2) power-plant-level...

To decarbonize the power sector, policy-makers need to commit to long-term credible rules for climate and energy policy. Otherwise, risk of opportunistic policy-making will impair investments into low-carbon technologies. However, the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to...

In the last two decades, feed-in tariffs (FIT) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS) have emerged as two of the most popular policies for supporting renewable electricity (RES-E) generation in the developed world. A few studies have assessed their effectiveness, but most do not account for...

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) are the most popular U.S. state-level policies for promoting deployment of renewable electricity (RES-E). While several econometric studies have estimated the effect of RPS on in-state RES-E deployment, results are contradictory. We reconcile these studies and...