IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/enejou/v31y2010i1p101-120.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Renewable Portfolio Standards: When Do They Lower Energy Prices?

Author

Listed:
  • Carolyn Fischer

Abstract

Some studies of renewable portfolio standards find that regulations increase electricity generation costs; others find that the reduced demand for nonrenewable energy sources lowers natural gas prices and that electricity prices follow. This paper presents reasons for why these predictions can vary in the direction as well as the magnitude of their effects. The two driving factors are the elasticity of electricity supply from renewable energy sources relative to nonrenewable ones and the effective stringency of the target. The availability of other baseload generation helps to determine that stringency, and demand elasticity influences only the magnitude of the price effects, not the direction of those effects. The paper also evaluates circumstances under which higher standards can decrease both certificate prices and renewable energy supply. Sensitivity analysis indicates that assumptions about renewable energy supply slopes are more important than those about nonrenewable supplies in predicting the retail price impacts of renewable portfolio standards.

Suggested Citation

  • Carolyn Fischer, 2010. "Renewable Portfolio Standards: When Do They Lower Energy Prices?," The Energy Journal, , vol. 31(1), pages 101-120, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:enejou:v:31:y:2010:i:1:p:101-120
    DOI: 10.5547/ISSN0195-6574-EJ-Vol31-No1-5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5547/ISSN0195-6574-EJ-Vol31-No1-5
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.5547/ISSN0195-6574-EJ-Vol31-No1-5?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
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Krichene, Noureddine, 2002. "World crude oil and natural gas: a demand and supply model," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 557-576, November.
    2. Amundsen, Eirik S. & Mortensen, Jorgen Birk, 2001. "The Danish Green Certificate System: some simple analytical results," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(5), pages 489-509, September.
    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. World Bank, 2014. "Climate Change Public Expenditure and Institutional Review Sourcebook," World Bank Publications - Reports 37953, The World Bank Group.
    2. Christoph Boehringer & Carsten Helm, 2025. "The impact of sector coupling on climate policy regulations," Working Papers V-453-25, University of Oldenburg, Department of Economics, revised Jun 2025.
    3. Fleance George Cocker, 2025. "Mixes of Policy Instruments for the Full Decarbonisation of Energy Systems: A Review," Energies, MDPI, vol. 18(1), pages 1-64, January.

    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. Böhringer, Christoph & Garcia-Muros, Xaquin & Gonzalez-Eguino, Mikel & Rey, Luis, 2017. "US climate policy: A critical assessment of intensity standards," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(S1), pages 125-135.
    2. Haugom, Erik & Mydland, Ørjan & Pichler, Alois, 2016. "Long term oil prices," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 84-94.
    3. Kolb, Sebastian & Plankenbühler, Thomas & Frank, Jonas & Dettelbacher, Johannes & Ludwig, Ralf & Karl, Jürgen & Dillig, Marius, 2021. "Scenarios for the integration of renewable gases into the German natural gas market – A simulation-based optimisation approach," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    4. Thibault Fally & James Sayre, 2018. "Commodity Trade Matters," 2018 Meeting Papers 172, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    5. Paul Koutstaal & Michiel Bijlsma & Gijsbert Zwart & X. van Tilburg, 2009. "Market performance and distributional effects on renewable energy markets," CPB Document 190.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    6. Böhringer, Christoph & Fischer, Carolyn & Rosendahl, Knut Einar, 2014. "Cost-effective unilateral climate policy design: Size matters," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 67(3), pages 318-339.
    7. Andrade de Sá, Saraly & Daubanes, Julien, 2016. "Limit pricing and the (in)effectiveness of the carbon tax," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 28-39.
    8. Christoph Böhringer & André Müller & Jan Schneider, 2015. "Carbon Tariffs Revisited," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 2(4), pages 629-672.
    9. Burke, Paul J. & Yang, Hewen, 2016. "The price and income elasticities of natural gas demand: International evidence," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 466-474.
    10. Hoy, Kyle A. & Wrenn, Douglas H., 2018. "Unconventional energy, taxation, and interstate welfare: An analysis of Pennsylvania's severance tax policy," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 53-65.
    11. Jensen, Stine Grenaa & Skytte, Klaus, 2003. "Simultaneous attainment of energy goals by means of green certificates and emission permits," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 63-71, January.
    12. Reinhard Madlener & Weiyu Gao & Ilja Neustadt & Peter Zweifel, 2008. "Promoting renewable electricity generation in imperfect markets: price vs. quantity policies," SOI - Working Papers 0809, Socioeconomic Institute - University of Zurich.
    13. Christoph Böhringer & Knut Einar Rosendahl & Halvor Storrøsten, 2021. "Smart hedging against carbon leakage [An overview of the GTAP 9 data base]," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 36(107), pages 439-484.
    14. Teng, Minmin & Lv, Kunfeng & Han, Chuanfeng & Liu, Pihui, 2025. "A tripartite stochastic evolutionary game for trading strategies under renewable portfolio standards in China’s electric power industry," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 240(C).
    15. Mulder, Peter & de Groot, Henri L.F., 2013. "Dutch sectoral energy intensity developments in international perspective, 1987–2005," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 501-512.
    16. repec:plo:pone00:0194296 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Sara Proença, 2013. "The role of renewable energy in Portugal´s decarbonisation strategy – application of the HyBGEM model," EcoMod2013 5647, EcoMod.
    18. Pablo del Río González, 2007. "The interaction between emissions trading and renewable electricity support schemes. An overview of the literature," Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Springer, vol. 12(8), pages 1363-1390, October.
    19. Chevillon, Guillaume & Rifflart, Christine, 2009. "Physical market determinants of the price of crude oil and the market premium," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 537-549, July.
    20. Stein-Erik Fleten & Johannes Mauritzen & Carl J. Ullrich, 2018. "The Other Renewable: Hydropower Upgrades and Renewable Portfolio Standards," The Energy Journal, , vol. 39(2), pages 197-218, March.
    21. Scott, K. Rebecca, 2015. "Demand and price uncertainty: Rational habits in international gasoline demand," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 40-49.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:sae:enejou:v:31:y:2010:i:1:p:101-120. 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: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    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.