IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v86y2015icp625-634.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Energy efficiency as a resource in state portfolio standards: Lessons for more expansive policies

Author

Listed:
  • Thoyre, Autumn

Abstract

In this paper, state electricity portfolio standards in the U.S. are analyzed to examine how energy efficiency is being created as a particular kind of resource through this type of climate change governance. Such policies can incentivize energy efficiency by requiring or encouraging electricity providers to meet a certain percentage of their demand through energy efficiency measures. North Carolina’s portfolio standard is used as an in-depth case study to identify factors that are then compared across all 36 states that include energy efficiency as part of a portfolio requirement or goal. The main finding of this study is that state portfolio standards tend to emphasize demand-side energy efficiency, or energy efficiency on the customer’s side of the electricity meter, and only rarely incentivize a full range of both demand-side and supply-side efficiency changes. As a result, the amount of energy efficiency and climate change mitigation benefits that are likely to result from this type of portfolio standard policy tool are limited. From this analysis, lessons are drawn out for crafting stronger portfolio standards that incentivize a wider range of efficiency changes across electricity networks.

Suggested Citation

  • Thoyre, Autumn, 2015. "Energy efficiency as a resource in state portfolio standards: Lessons for more expansive policies," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 625-634.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:enepol:v:86:y:2015:i:c:p:625-634
    DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2015.08.015
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421515300598
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.enpol.2015.08.015?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Croucher, Matt, 2011. "Are energy efficiency standards within the electricity sector a form of regulatory capture?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(6), pages 3602-3604, June.
    2. Brown, Marilyn A., 2001. "Market failures and barriers as a basis for clean energy policies," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 29(14), pages 1197-1207, November.
    3. Kenneth Gillingham & Richard G. Newell & Karen Palmer, 2009. "Energy Efficiency Economics and Policy," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 597-620, September.
    4. Lenard, Thomas M., 2009. "Renewable Electricity Standards, Energy Efficiency, and Cost-Effective Climate-Change Policy," The Electricity Journal, Elsevier, vol. 22(8), pages 55-64, October.
    5. Terry Dinan, 2012. "Offsetting a Carbon Tax’s Costs on Low-Income Households: Working Paper 2012-16," Working Papers 43713, Congressional Budget Office.
    6. Adam G. Bumpus & Diana M. Liverman, 2008. "Accumulation by Decarbonization and the Governance of Carbon Offsets," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 84(2), pages 127-155, April.
    7. Brown, Marilyn A. & Gumerman, Etan & Sun, Xiaojing & Sercy, Kenneth & Kim, Gyungwon, 2012. "Myths and facts about electricity in the U.S. South," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 231-241.
    8. Adam G. Bumpus & Diana M. Liverman, 2008. "Accumulation by Decarbonization and the Governance of Carbon Offsets," Economic Geography, Clark University, vol. 84(2), pages 127-155, April.
    9. Eric Hirst, 1992. "Price and Cost Impacts of Utility DSM Programs," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 4), pages 75-90.
    10. Chandler, Jess, 2009. "Trendy solutions: Why do states adopt Sustainable Energy Portfolio Standards?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(8), pages 3274-3281, August.
    11. Schweitzer, Martin & Tonn, Bruce, 2003. "Non-energy benefits of the US Weatherization Assistance Program: a summary of their scope and magnitude," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 76(4), pages 321-335, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tomasz Rokicki & Grzegorz Koszela & Luiza Ochnio & Kamil Wojtczuk & Marcin Ratajczak & Hubert Szczepaniuk & Konrad Michalski & Piotr Bórawski & Aneta Bełdycka-Bórawska, 2021. "Diversity and Changes in Energy Consumption by Transport in EU Countries," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(17), pages 1-21, August.
    2. Alqahtani, Bandar Jubran & Patiño-Echeverri, Dalia, 2019. "Combined effects of policies to increase energy efficiency and distributed solar generation: A case study of the Carolinas," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    3. Rhodes, Ekaterina & Scott, William A. & Jaccard, Mark, 2021. "Designing flexible regulations to mitigate climate change: A cross-country comparative policy analysis," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    4. Rogério Diogne de Souza e Silva & Rosana Cavalcante de Oliveira & Maria Emília de Lima Tostes, 2017. "Analysis of the Brazilian Energy Efficiency Program for Electricity Distribution Systems," Energies, MDPI, vol. 10(9), pages 1-19, September.
    5. Alexander Melnik & Irina Naoumova & Kirill Ermolaev & Jerome Katrichis, 2021. "Driving Innovation through Energy Efficiency: A Russian Regional Analysis," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-19, April.
    6. Forouli, Aikaterini & Gkonis, Nikolaos & Nikas, Alexandros & Siskos, Eleftherios & Doukas, Haris & Tourkolias, Christos, 2019. "Energy efficiency promotion in Greece in light of risk: Evaluating policies as portfolio assets," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 170(C), pages 818-831.
    7. Jinpeng Liu & Li Wang & Mohan Qiu & Jiang Zhu, 2016. "Promotion Potentiality and Optimal Strategies Analysis of Provincial Energy Efficiency in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 8(8), pages 1-17, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eyre, Nick, 2013. "Energy saving in energy market reform—The feed-in tariffs option," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 190-198.
    2. Vitaliy Roud & Thomas Wolfgang Thurner, 2018. "The Influence of State‐Ownership on Eco‐Innovations in Russian Manufacturing Firms," Journal of Industrial Ecology, Yale University, vol. 22(5), pages 1213-1227, October.
    3. Natalie Slawinski & Jonatan Pinkse & Timo Busch & Subhabrata Bobby Banerjeed, 2014. "The role of short-termism and uncertainty in organizational inaction on climate change: multilevel framework," Working Papers hal-00961226, HAL.
    4. Schleich, Joachim & Gassmann, Xavier & Faure, Corinne & Meissner, Thomas, 2016. "Making the implicit explicit: A look inside the implicit discount rate," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 321-331.
    5. Josefa Sánchez Contreras & Alberto Matarán Ruiz & Luis Villodres Ramírez & Celia Jiménez Martín & Guillermo Gámez Rodríguez & Rafael Martín Pérez & Álvaro Campos-Celador, 2024. "Energy Colonialism in Europe: A Participatory Analysis of the Case of Granada (Spain)," Land, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-27, January.
    6. Häckel, Björn & Pfosser, Stefan & Tränkler, Timm, 2017. "Explaining the energy efficiency gap - Expected Utility Theory versus Cumulative Prospect Theory," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 414-426.
    7. Brennan, Timothy J., 2011. "Energy Efficiency Policy: Surveying the Puzzles," RFF Working Paper Series dp-11-27, Resources for the Future.
    8. Jayme Walenta, 2020. "Climate risk assessments and science‐based targets: A review of emerging private sector climate action tools," Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 11(2), March.
    9. Anna Davies & Niamh Kirwan, 2010. "Rescaling climate justice: sub-national issues and innovations for low carbon futures," The Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper Series iiisdp340, IIIS.
    10. Howard, Rebecca Joy & Tallontire, Anne & Stringer, Lindsay & Marchant, Rob, 2015. "Unraveling the Notion of “Fair Carbon”: Key Challenges for Standards Development," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 343-356.
    11. Nabernegg, Stefan & Bednar-Friedl, Birgit & Muñoz, Pablo & Titz, Michaela & Vogel, Johanna, 2019. "National Policies for Global Emission Reductions: Effectiveness of Carbon Emission Reductions in International Supply Chains," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 158(C), pages 146-157.
    12. Kelly Kay, 2016. "Breaking the bundle of rights: Conservation easements and the legal geographies of individuating nature," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(3), pages 504-522, March.
    13. Antunes, Jorge Junio Moreira & Neves, Juliana Campos & Elmor, Larissa Rosa Carneiro & Araujo, Michel Fontaine Reis De & Wanke, Peter Fernandes & Tan, Yong, 2023. "A new perspective on the U.S. energy efficiency: The political context," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 186(PA).
    14. Xiaoying Xu & Xinxin Tian, 2023. "Dynamic Evolution and Trend Prediction in Coupling Coordination between Energy Consumption and Green Development in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(18), pages 1-21, September.
    15. Anderson, Blake & M'Gonigle, Michael, 2012. "Does ecological economics have a future?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 37-48.
    16. Anna Dahlqvist & Patrik S derholm, 2019. "Industrial Energy Use, Management Practices and Price Signals: The Case of Swedish Process Industry," International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy, Econjournals, vol. 9(3), pages 30-45.
    17. Artur Meynkhard, 2019. "Energy Efficient Development Model for Regions of the Russian Federation: Evidence of Crypto Mining," International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy, Econjournals, vol. 9(4), pages 16-21.
    18. Altwies, Joy E. & Nemet, Gregory F., 2013. "Innovation in the U.S. building sector: An assessment of patent citations in building energy control technology," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 819-831.
    19. Heather Lovell & Harriet Bulkeley & Diana Liverman, 2009. "Carbon Offsetting: Sustaining Consumption?," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 41(10), pages 2357-2379, October.
    20. Spash, Clive L. & Theine, Hendrik, 2016. "Voluntary Individual Carbon Trading," SRE-Discussion Papers 2016/04, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
      • Clive L. Spash & Hendrik Theine, 2016. "Voluntary Individual Carbon Trading," SRE-Disc sre-disc-2016_04, Institute for Multilevel Governance and Development, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:enepol:v:86:y:2015:i:c:p:625-634. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.