MULTICRITERIA PRIORITIZATION OF POLICY INSTRUMENTS IN BUILDINGS ENERGY RETROFIT

Improvement of energy-efficiency in residential buildings is a crucial issue in Italy, where 55% of the building stock is older than 40 years and real estate assets are responsible for 33% of primary energy consumption. Consequently, the Italian residential sector offers considerable potential for reducing energy use and GHG emissions, particularly through energy-efficient renovations. Governments can introduce a wide range of policy instruments to encourage households in undertaking energy-efficient renovations: direct financial investments, regulatory instruments (e.g., performance and technology standards), economic and market-based instruments, support information and voluntary actions. Since 2006, the Italian Government has introduced fiscal incentive programs to enhance energy efficiency in residential buildings. During the period 1998-2016 the cost for the Italian Government to due to fiscal incentives (i.e. tax deductions) was extremely high compared to tax revenues. Thus incentives turned out to be excessively costly and not cost-effective. The design and implementation of incentive policies to buildings energy retrofit is a complex process involving a great number of decision variables and actors. Cost-effective incentive policies should prove capacity in stimulating investments, reducing social and environmental costs and promoting innovation. This complexity is exacerbated in the presence of stringent public budget constraints and lack of financial resources. In order to favor the implementation of cost-effective retrofit strategies, the policy maker must take into consideration along with buildings age and construction materials, social costs and benefits, EU and national targets, and environmental concerns. In this context, where multiple objectives need to be pursued, multiple criteria approaches provide a methodological framework to address the complexity of economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental factors which characterize incentive policies. In this paper we propose a multi-criteria decision model to support the policy maker in ranking sustainable incentive policies. In detail, we provide an AHP model for multiple-criteria prioritization of policy instruments to foster investments in energy retrofit of existing buildings

A review of subsidy and carbon price approaches to greenhouse gas emission reduction

The Climate Institute requested SKM MMA and Centre of Policy Studies (CoPS) to undertake an assessment of alternative policy options to achieve a given carbon emission target in Australia. The focus of the study was to compare outcomes under a suite of subsidy based policies to the outcomes under an emission trading scheme. The outcomes of the study are presented in this report.There are several market based approaches that could be used to achieve a carbon emission target. Which approach is more or less effective in achieving the target will depend on any restriction placed on the measure, the ability of each approach to manage the uncertainties on the cost and future scale of abating carbon emissions, the long term behavioural signals provided and the relative impacts on the broader economy.In principle, a subsidy scheme, such as the proposed Emission Reduction Fund (ERF), could achieve the same level of abatement at a similar cost to an emission trading scheme provided the sectoral coverage was the same and the eligible abatement options were the same. Any difference in effectiveness and cost may be due to other factors such as a limit on the budget available to be spent through the subsidy scheme and differences in sectoral coverage. Whether projects receiving funding under the subsidy scheme will proceed or go under either before they are built or after a few years of operation, as has happened under other subsidy scheme, is also important to the effectiveness of the scheme.SKM MMA used a marginal abatement cost approach to assess the options chosen under the subsidy fund. The approach was used to assess a range of emissions abatement opportunities in a range of sectors covering energy, transport, agriculture and land use change, industrial processes, fugitive emissions, and waste. The approach involved the assessment of the cost and potential emission abatement of the eligible options. The assumption was that the lowest cost combination of options is selected under the fund to meet the abatement cap up to any budget or other declared constraints. Only options that are additional (i.e. would not have proceeded in absence of the fund or carbon abatement incentive) were considered.The estimated level of abatement by options and their cost are input into CoPS’s Monash Multi Regional Forecasting Model (MMRF)to determine broader economic impacts.This report outlines the assumptions and method used and discusses the result of the modelling. Limitations and uncertainties in the approach are also outlined. The focus of the analysis was on potential impacts – there is no discussion on which approach is more efficient

A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters

Research interest in Grid computing has grown significantly over the past five years. Management of distributed resources is one of the key issues in Grid computing. Central to management of resources is the effectiveness of resource allocation as it determines the overall utility of the system. The current approaches to superscheduling in a grid environment are non-coordinated since application level schedulers or brokers make scheduling decisions independently of the others in the system. Clearly, this can exacerbate the load sharing and utilization problems of distributed resources due to suboptimal schedules that are likely to occur. To overcome these limitations, we propose a mechanism for coordinated sharing of distributed clusters based on computational economy. The resulting environment, called \emph{Grid-Federation}, allows the transparent use of resources from the federation when local resources are insufficient to meet its users' requirements. The use of computational economy methodology in coordinating resource allocation not only facilitates the QoS based scheduling, but also enhances utility delivered by resources.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the conference paper published at IEEE Cluster'05, Boston, M

Comparing the cost-effectiveness of water conservation policies in a depleting aquifer: a dynamic analysis of the Kansas High Plains

This research analyzes two groundwater conservation policies in the Kansas High Plains located within the Ogallala aquifer: 1) cost-share assistance to increase irrigation efficiency; and 2) incentive payments to convert irrigated crop production to dryland crop production. To compare the cost-effectiveness of these two policies, a dynamic model simulated a representative irrigator’s optimal technology choice, crop selection, and irrigation water use over time. The results suggest that the overall water-saving effectiveness can be improved when different policy tools are considered under different conditions. High prevailing crop prices greatly reduce irrigators’ incentive to give up irrigation and therefore cause low enrollment and ineffectiveness of the incentive payment program. In areas with low aquifer-saturated thickness, the incentive payment program is more effective, whereas in areas with relatively higher water availability, the cost-share program could be a better choice

Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Participatory sensing is a powerful paradigm which takes advantage of smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. Given that participatory sensing systems rely completely on the users' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information, it is paramount to effectively incentivize users' active and reliable participation. In this paper, we survey existing literature on incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems. In particular, we present a taxonomy of existing incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems, which are subsequently discussed in depth by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Finally, we discuss an agenda of open research challenges in incentivizing users in participatory sensing.Comment: Updated version, 4/25/201

Structuring national and sub-national economic incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation in Indonesia

We estimate the impacts that alternative national and sub-national economic incentive structures for reducing emissions from deforestation (REDD+) in Indonesia would have had on greenhouse gas emissions and national and local revenue if they had been in place from 2000-2005. The impact of carbon payments on deforestation is calibrated econometrically from the pattern of observed deforestation and spatial variation in the benefits and costs of converting land to agriculture over that time period. We estimate that at an international carbon price of $10/tCO2e, a “basic voluntary incentive structure” modeled after a traditional payment-for-ecosystem-services (PES) program would have reduced emissions nationally by 62 MtCO2e/yr, or 8% below the without-REDD+ reference scenario (95% CI: 45-76 MtCO2e/yr; 6-9%), while generating a programmatic budget shortfall. By making four policy improvements—paying for net emission reductions at the scale of an entire district rather than site-by-site, paying for reductions relative to estimated business-as-usual levels rather than historical levels, sharing a portion of district-level revenues with the national government, and sharing a portion of the national government’s responsibility for costs with districts—an “improved voluntary incentive structure” would have reduced emissions by 175 MtCO2e/yr, or 22% below the reference scenario (95% CI: 136-207 MtCO2e/yr; 17-26%), while generating a programmatic budget surplus. A “regulatory incentive structure” such as a cap-and-trade or symmetric tax-and-subsidy program would have reduced emissions by 211/yr, or 26% below the reference scenario (95% CI: 163-247 MtCO2e/yr; 20-31%), and would not have required accurate predictions of business-as-usual emissions to guarantee a programmatic budget surplus.Climate change, land-use change, REDD+, reference levels, economic incentives

Informative Voting and the Samuelson Rule

We study the classical free-rider problem in public goods provision in a large economy with uncertainty about the average valuation of the public good. Individual preferences over public goods are shaped by a skill and a taste parameter. We use a mechanism design approach to solve for the optimal utilitarian provision rule. The relevant incentive constraints for information aggregation ensure that individuals behave as if they were engaging in informative voting over the level of public good provision. It is shown that the use of information by an optimal provision rule is inversely related to the polarization of preferences which results from the properties of the skill distribution