Energy Efficiency Policy: Surveying the Puzzles

Promoting energy efficiency (EE) has become a leading policy response to greenhouse gas emissions, energy dependence, and the cost of new generators and transmission lines. Such policies present numerous puzzles. Electricity prices below marginal production costs could warrant EE policies if EE and energy are substitutes, but they will not be substitutes if the energy price is sufficiently high. Using EE savings to meet renewable energy requirements can dramatically increase the marginal cost of electricity. Rejecting “rationality” of consumer energy choices raises doubts regarding cost–benefit analysis when demand curves may not reveal willingness to pay. Decoupling to guarantee constant profit regardless of use contradicts findings that incentive-based mechanisms outperform cost-of-service regulation. Regulators may implement EE policies to exercise buyer-side market power against generators, increasing consumer welfare but reducing overall economic performance. Encouraging utilities to take over potentially competitive EE contradicts policies to separate competitive from monopoly enterprises.energy efficiency, energy policy, decoupling, monopsony, vertical integration

Innovating thermal treatment of municipal solid waste (MSW): Socio-technical change linking expectations and representations

This paper combines two theoretical perspectives: future technological expectations mobilising resources; and social representations assimilating new ideas through anchoring onto familiar frames of reference. The combination is applied to the controversial case of thermal-treatment options for municipal solid waste (MSW), especially via gasification technology. Stakeholders’ social representations set criteria for technological expectations and their demonstration requirements, whose fulfilment in turn has helped gasification to gain more favourable representations. Through a differential ‘anchoring’, gasification is represented as matching incineration’s positive features while avoiding its negative ones. Despite their limitations, current two-stage combustion gasifiers are promoted as a crucial transition towards a truly ‘advanced’ form producing a clean syngas; R&D investment reinforces expectations for advancing the technology. Such linkages between technological expectations and social representations may have broader relevance to socio-technical change, especially where public controversy arises over the wider systemic role of an innovation trajectory

Some behavioral aspects of energy descent: How a biophysical psychology might help people transition through the lean times ahead

This article is part of the Research Topic: Nature and environment: The psychology of its benefits and its protection.We may soon face biophysical limits to perpetual growth. Energy supplies may tighten and then begin a long slow descent while defensive expenditures rise to address problems caused by past resource consumption. The outcome may be significant changes in daily routines at the individual and community level. It is difficult to know when this scenario might begin to unfold but it clearly would constitute a new behavioral context, one that the behavioral sciences least attends to. Even if one posits a less dramatic scenario, people may still need to make many urgent and perhaps unsettling transitions. And while a robust response would be needed, it is not at all clear what should be the details of that response. Since it is likely that no single response will fix things everywhere, for all people or for all time, it would be useful to conduct many social experiments. Indeed, a culture of small experiments should be fostered which, at the individual and small group level, can be described as behavioral entrepreneurship. This may have begun, hidden in plain sight, but more social experiments are needed. To be of help, it may be useful to both package behavioral insights in a way that is practitioner-oriented and grounded in biophysical trends and to propose a few key questions that need attention. This paper begins the process of developing a biophysical psychology, incomplete as it is at this early stage.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109261/1/De Young, R. (2014) Some behavioral aspects of energy descent, How a biophysical psychology might help people transition through the lean times ahead, Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1255.pdfDescription of De Young, R. (2014) Some behavioral aspects of energy descent, How a biophysical psychology might help people transition through the lean times ahead, Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1255.pdf : Main articl

Penalizing Consumers for Saving Electricity

In response to climate change, many electric utilities introduce pricing schemes to induce their customers to consume less electricity. When a significant portion of the consumer population finds it more costly to economize electricity, one would expect utilities to offer incentives in return for lower usage of electricity. The model put forward in this paper enhances understanding of why a typical electric utility may instead prefer to increase prices, in so doing discriminating against environmentally conscious customers. This result holds even when the utility is charged for its greenhouse gas emissions. But in this case the price increase is sufficiently small to induce energy savings also from customers for whom there is a net cost in doing so.pricing structure, environment, electricity, consumer switching costs

Penalizing consumers for saving electricity.

In response to climate change, many electric utilities introduce pricing schemes to induce their customers to consume less electricity. When a significant portion of the consumer population finds it more costly to economize electricity, one would expect utilities to offer incentives in return for lower usage of electricity. The model put forward in this paper enhances understanding of why a typical electric utility may instead prefer to increase prices, in so doing discriminating against environmentally conscious customers. This result holds even when the utility is charged for its greenhouse gas emissions. But in this case the price increase is sufficiently small to induce energy savings also from customers for whom there is a net cost in doing so.

Assessing the American Power Act: The Economic, Employment, Energy Security, and Environmental Impact of Senator Kerry and Senator Lieberman's Discussion Draft

On May 12, 2010, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) released details of their proposed American Power Act, a comprehensive energy and climate change bill developed over the preceding nine months by the two senators, chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations and Homeland Security Committees respectively, along with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).1 With US unemployment just below 10 percent and the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig's ruptured well pouring thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day, the senators promised that if passed the bill will: (1) reduce US oil consumption and dependence on oil imports; (2) cut US carbon pollution 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and over 80 percent by 2050; and (3) create jobs and restore US global economic leadership. In this policy brief the authors evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed American Power Act in achieving those goals.