236,099 research outputs found
Policy Risk and Private Investment in Ontarioâs Wind Power Sector
Even though governments may adopt favourable regulatory policies for renewable power generation, their ability to encourage private sector investment depends also on the presence of regulatory governance institutions that provide credible long-term commitments to potential investors. In the case of Ontario we contend that, despite large market potential and comparatively strong regulatory incentive policies, weak regulatory governance is one factor that has accounted for the challenges in attracting and implementing large scale private investment in power generation at a reasonable cost. We find empirical support for our arguments in a unique survey of 63 wind power firms that assessed private sector opinions about the investment environment for renewable energy in Ontario. Compared to a range of factors, firms rated the stability of regulatory policy among the weakest aspects of Ontario?s business environment. However, policy stability ranked among the most important factors in firms? assessments of the attractiveness of alternative jurisdictions in their location decisions. Subsequent interviews revealed that firms have responded to this risk in Ontario by explicitly pricing it into wind project financial models â implying higher wind power prices for ratepayers â and by directing investment funds to other jurisdictions. We argue that policy stability in Ontario may be improved by devolving greater decision-making authority to regulatory agencies in the energy sector and by strengthening their institutional independence.
Legacies of a Past Modernism Discourses of Development and the Shaping of Centralized Electricity Infastructures in Late- and Postcolonial Tanzania
As the UN has declared the years 2014-2024 the âDecade of Sustainable Energy for Allâ, countries in Sub-Saharan
Africa struggle with the transition towards more sustainable and more inclusive energy infrastructures. In many rural
areas, electrification rates remain as low as 1-2%. For many countries, one of the main barriers for rural electrification
is the legacy of a model of top-down planning, large-scale power generation and a centralized topology of the
electricity infrastructure. Nonetheless, historiography on electricity infrastructures in Africa is nearly non-existent. At
the example of Tanzania this paper shows, that the centralized power models which dominate the continent today
were shaped by modernization and development discourses during the late colonial and post-independence period.
Because of its particular characteristics, electricity lent itself perfectly to the goal of making development measurable
â a goal which was essential to a âhigh modernistâ vision of development, advocated by new nation states as
well as international funders. The paper illustrates how large hydropower projects proved successful in expanding
generation capacities and urban electrification rates, but failed in providing electricity to rural areas and created pathdependencies
which have led to dead ends in the last 20 years
Presidential Control, Expertise, and the Deference Dilemma
Courts reviewing agency action frequently point to superior political accountability and expertise as justifying deference to agencies. These fundamentals of deference often operate in tandem, providing distinct but complimentary reasons why courts will not substitute their judgment for that of agencies. But when courts review agency actions arising from shared regulatory space, political accountabilityâoften expressed as presidential controlâand expertise can seem at odds. How should courts respond when, for example, one agency lays claim to presidential control but another relies on expertise, and the two take inconsistent positions so that a court must choose one over the other? This Article examines this deference dilemma and suggests a means for confronting it. Overall, this analysis reveals that the expertise and presidential-control justifications for deference do not fit neatly into statutory schemes involving overlapping or competing jurisdiction, particularly when an independent agency is involved. This conclusion exposes weaknesses in both models of deference and supports the claim thatâpresidential direction and expertise notwithstandingâfidelity to statute and the reasoned-decisionmaking requirements remain the touchpoints of judicial review. These touchpoints are central to unlocking the deference dilemma and resolving it in a principled manner, as demonstrated by the framework developed in this Article. Approaching deference dilemmas in this way helps facilitate congressional control while recognizing the policymaking authority of the executive branch, and ultimately contributes to a norm that accounts for the roles of all three branches in administrative law
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Evercare/United Health Group briefing paper
The paper examines some of the issues raised by the recent involvement of Evercare, part of the US company, United Health Group, in a Department of Health (England) pilot initiative on the use of a case management approach to keep frail, older people out of hospital
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Regulatory effectiveness: the impact of regulation and regulatory governance arrangements on electricity industry outcomes: a review paper
The incomplete transformation of institutions of economic policy: from clientelism to competition?
Economic policy in Turkey has gone through significant amount of transformation in the last three decades. While Turkey used to be a closed economy governed by an import-substitution industrialization strategy, starting in the early 1980s it went through substantial liberalization and privatization, and the market mechanism has gained increased importance in the allocation o
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Electricity Sector Reform in Developing Countries: A Survey of Empirical Evidence on Determinants and Performance
This paper reviews the empirical evidence on electricity reform in developing countries. We find that country institutions and sector governance play an important role in success and failure of reform; reforms appear to have increased operating efficiency and expanded access to urban customers; they have to a lesser degree passed on efficiency gains to customers, tackled distributional effects, or improved rural access. Moreover, some of the literature is not methodologically robust or on a par with general development economics literature and findings on some issues are limited and inconclusive while some important areas are yet to be addressed. Until we know more, implementation of reforms will be more based on ideology and economic theory rather than solid economic evidence.The World Bank Electricity Research Programme and the CMI Electricity Project (IR-45
Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning
Behavioral cloning reduces policy learning to supervised learning by training
a discriminative model to predict expert actions given observations. Such
discriminative models are non-causal: the training procedure is unaware of the
causal structure of the interaction between the expert and the environment. We
point out that ignoring causality is particularly damaging because of the
distributional shift in imitation learning. In particular, it leads to a
counter-intuitive "causal misidentification" phenomenon: access to more
information can yield worse performance. We investigate how this problem
arises, and propose a solution to combat it through targeted
interventions---either environment interaction or expert queries---to determine
the correct causal model. We show that causal misidentification occurs in
several benchmark control domains as well as realistic driving settings, and
validate our solution against DAgger and other baselines and ablations.Comment: Published at NeurIPS 2019 9 pages, plus references and appendice
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