We investigate the relationship between accumulated experience completing wind power projects and the cost of installing wind projects in the U.S. from 2001-2015. Our modeling framework disentangles accumulated experience from input price changes, scale economies, and exogenous technical change; and accounts for both firm-specific and industry-wide accumulated experience. We find evidence consistent with cost-reducing benefits from firm-specific experience for that firm’s cost of future wind power projects, but no evidence of industry-wide learning from the experience of other participants in the industry. Further, our experience measure rapidly depreciates across time and distance, suggesting a stable industry trajectory would lower project costs.

This paper identifies the key features of successful electricity market designs that are particularly relevant to the experience of low-income countries. Important features include: (1) the match between the short-term market used to dispatch generation units and the physical operation of the electricity network, (2) effective regulatory and market mechanisms to ensure long-term generation resource adequacy, (3) appropriate mechanisms to mitigate local market power, and (4) mechanisms to allow the active involvement of final demand in a short-term market. The paper provides a recommended baseline market design that reflects the experience of the past 25 years
with electricity restructuring processes. It then suggests a simplified version of this market design ideally suited to the proposed East and Western Sub-Sahara Africa regional wholesale market that is likely to realise a substantial amount of the economic benefits from forming a regional market with minimal implementation cost and regulatory burden. Recommendations are also provided for modifying the Southern African Power Pool to increase the economic benefits realised from its formation. How this market design supports the cost-effective integration of renewables is discussed and future enhancements are proposed that support the integration of a greater share
of intermittent renewables. The paper closes with proposed directions for future research in the area of electricity market design in developing countries.

Significant political barriers to implementing na- tional climate policies exist in both the US and China. Successful linkage of regional climate policies in the two countries can help overcome these impediments. Each country can be seen as willing to cooperate with the other to address the global climate challenge, which can help each national government overcome the resistance to formulating its own national climate policy.

Solving the climate challenge involves many years of sustained actions coordinated across the major emitting countries. Like any long journey, it begins with︎ a first step. Coordinating regional policies is such a step.

Californians like to think of themselves as environmentally conscious and forward-thinking. The state’s energy and environmental policies reflect these sentiments. With the passage of SB 100, California has one of the nation’s most ambitious renewable energy goals for its electricity supply industry. The California Solar Initiative rebate program has led to more rooftop solar capacity in the state than the total rooftop solar capacity installed in the next eight highest-capacity states. AB32 established California as the only state with its own cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions. This market currently sets the nation’s highest price for a ton of greenhouse gas emissions. California recently set a goal of five million electric vehicles in the state by 2030. Under AB 2514, California’s three investor-owned utilities are required to purchase 1,325 megawatts of grid-scale storage capacity and AB 2868 requires them to purchase 500 megawatts of behind-the-meter storage capacity. All of these policies have made California a global leader in the transition to a less carbon-intensive energy sector.

There is one major downside to California’s energy and environmental policies: they are extremely expensive for California consumers. Average residential electricity prices in California are among the highest in the nation—not because it is so expensive to produce electricity in the state, but because the costs of these policies are recovered from retail electricity prices. A comparison to Texas, another large state that also uses natural gas to power most of its electricity generation fleet, illustrates this point. According to the US Energy Information Administration (US-EIA), average residential electricity prices in California are currently about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) versus 10 cents per kWh in Texas. However, average wholesale electricity prices in the two states are roughly equal.

This difference in retail prices is primarily due to different policy responses in the two states to the shale gas boom that started in the mid-2000s and ultimately led to a roughly 66 percent decline in the wholesale price of natural gas. California responded to these low natural gas prices with spending on the policies described above and no reductions in retail electricity prices, despite average wholesale electricity prices in California falling by one-half to two-thirds relative to their pre-shale gas boom levels. Texas responded to this decline in natural gas prices by implementing vigorous retail competition for all classes of customers, which passed on the resulting lower wholesale electricity prices into lower retail electricity prices.

What is more surprising about the Texas-versus-California comparison is that over this same time period Texas managed to build more zero-carbon wind and solar generation capacity than California. Texas currently has more than 22,000 megawatts (MWs) of grid-scale wind and solar capacity versus about 17,000 MWs in California. Different from California, Texas has accomplished this massive renewable generation buildout which also produces more renewable energy on an annual basis than California with no state-mandated financial support mechanisms beyond its competitive renewable energy zone (CREZ) policy that proactively expanded the state’s transmission network to regions with significant renewable resources. Texas’s market-based approach to fostering renewable generation entry has led to more capacity at significantly lower cost relative to California’s legislatively mandated and consumer-financed approach.

Because Californians are likely to want to continue to lead the energy transition, the relevant policy design question is: How can the state achieve these low-carbon energy goals in a more cost- effective manner?

As the old saying goes, politics makes strange bedfellows.  A national carbon tax to fund increased border security fits that description. President Trump's request for these funds is a major sticking point with Democrats in the current budget impasse. However, many of the younger generation of Democrats elected to the House in the midterm election strongly support government action to address the climate challenge. 

Is there a way for all sides to declare victory from this solution? Increased funding for border security would allow the president to fulfill a campaign promise that is extremely important to his base. A carbon tax would allow Democrats to score a major climate policy victory. A significant chunk of the revenues from the carbon tax could go to increase the safety of asylum-seekers and the speed at which their requests are processed. The remaining revenues could contribute to the deficit reduction goals of traditional Republicans. Finally, all three groups could claim credit for a reduced risk of global climate change and a more humanitarian approach to dealing with asylum-seekers.

Progressive Democrats assert that the Green New Deal is the best way to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

But this claim ignores the fact that subsidizing “green” energy technologies, such as wind and solar, is less effective than taxing the greenhouse gas emissions produced by brown energy sources, such as oil, natural gas and coal.

Floods and other climate hazards pose a widespread and growing threat to housing and infrastructure around the world. By incorporating climate risk into asset prices, markets can discourage excessive development in hazardous areas. However, the extent to which markets actually price these risks remains poorly understood. Here we measure the effect of information about flood risk on residential property values in the United States. Using multiple empirical approaches and two decades of sales data covering the universe of homes in the US, we find little evidence that housing markets fully price information about flood risk in aggregate. However, the price penalty for flood risk is larger for commercial buyers and in states where sellers must disclose information about flood risk to potential buyers, suggesting that policies to improve risk communication could influence market outcomes. Our findings indicate that floodplain homes in the US are currently overvalued by a total of $34B, raising concerns about the stability of real estate markets as climate risks become more salient and severe.

California has experienced devastating autumn wildfires in recent years. These autumn wildfires have coincided with extreme fire weather conditions during periods of strong offshore winds coincident with unusually dry vegetation enabled by anomalously warm conditions and late onset of autumn precipitation. In this study, we quantify observed changes in the occurrence and magnitude of meteorological factors that enable extreme autumn wildfires in California, and use climate model simulations to ascertain whether these changes are attributable to human-caused climate change. We show that state-wide increases in autumn temperature (~1 ˚C) and decreases in autumn precipitation (~30%) over the past four decades have contributed to increases in aggregate fire weather indices (+20%). As a result, the observed frequency of autumn days with extreme (95th percentile) fire weather – which we show are preferentially associated with extreme autumn wildfires – has more than doubled in California since the early 1980s. We further find an increase in the climate model-estimated probability of these extreme autumn conditions since ~1950, including a long-term trend toward increased same-season co-occurrence of extreme fire weather conditions in northern and southern California. Our climate model analyses suggest that continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century, though a pathway consistent with the UN Paris commitments would substantially curb that increase. Given the acute societal impacts of extreme autumn wildfires in recent years, our findings have critical relevance for ongoing efforts to manage wildfire risks in California and other regions.

Independent verification of anthropogenic influence on specific extreme climate events remains elusive. This study presents a framework for such verification. This framework reveals that previously published results based on a 1961–2005 attribution period frequently underestimate the influence of global warming on the probability of unprecedented extremes during the 2006–2017 period. This underestimation is particularly pronounced for hot and wet events, with greater uncertainty for dry events. The underestimation is reflected in discrepancies between probabilities predicted during the attribution period and frequencies observed during the out-of-sample verification period. These discrepancies are most explained by increases in climate forcing between the attribution and verification periods, suggesting that 21st-century global warming has substantially increased the probability of unprecedented hot and wet events. Hence, the use of temporally lagged periods for attribution—and, more broadly, for extreme event probability quantification—can cause underestimation of historical impacts, and current and future risks.

Researchers including David Lobell analyze how human-caused climate change has impacted a water deficit in Southern Africa and might contribute to a rising food security crisis in the region.