Les Certificats d'Economie d'Energie entre économie et politique

To encourage building renovations and the replacement of old energy-consuming equipment, some governments have introduced a system of white certificates requiring large producers and distributors of natural gas, electricity and fuel to prove that they have financed energy-saving operations. The system is proving to be much less efficient than expected because energy saving works are "credence goods", which means that their quality can be correctly measured neither before nor after their achievement. Because of this informational bias, white certificates encourage economically inefficient works. Despite this, they are favored by the public authorities because they belong to the panoply of nonpunitive, non-fiscal, decentralized and local job-creating micro-policies.