Publications
Some of my recent and more important research papers
Wholesale electricity prices have historically been volatile, especially in the spot market. This volatility has a cost, and if utilities and regulators plan investments looking only at the expected average cost of power without taking into account the cost of this volatility, they will tend to rely too heavily on spot market purchases as a “low cost” option, and underinvest in less risky resources, including long-term contracts and energy efficiency.
In this paper we estimated the value at risk in the PJM service territory caused by spot market volatility and found that it adds as much as a 25% cost premium in extreme years and a 14% premium in more normal years.
In 2017, Maryland was considering whether or not to extend their EmPOWER energy efficiency program. The first phase of EmPOWER was highly successful, with Maryland utilities reducing per-capita electricity consumption by 10% and saving consumers over $4 billion. Our study found that keeping EmPOWER in place would create 68,000 net new jobs, increase state gross domestic product by $3.75 billion, and save Maryland homes and businesses nearly $12 billion.
This was a relatively straightforward modeling exercise, but it was a critical piece of evidence in the debate over keeping EmPOWER. While some were describing EmPOWER as an expensive program or even an energy tax, we showed that it was actually a huge money-saver and a significant source of job creation for the state.
Ultimately, the EmPOWER legislation passed, avoided the threatened veto from the Governor, and is now law.
The American Society of Civil Engineers routinely finds that America’s infrastructure is failing, both literally and figuratively, giving it an overall grade of D+ in 2017 (which was actually an improvement from their previous report). In this paper I worked on with the Blue Green Alliance looks at what it would take to bring that grade up to a B, and what the impacts on the economy would be. We found that it would create about 14.5 million years’ worth of full time jobs and add a net $1.7 trillion to the economy over 10 years.
In 2011, Bank of America launched its Energy Efficiency Finance Program, making $55 million available to Community Development Financial Institutions for low-cost loans in low- and moderate-income communities. They contracted with us to review the results of the program to look at both the financial and energy savings performance of the loans.
We found that overall, the program was working well, with 98.8% of the loan volume current (payments were up to date or no more than 30 days overdue). Given limited data on the energy performance of the buildings, we were unable to draw broad-based conclusions, but we found that several lenders had found ways to structure programs that delivered substantial energy savings to LMI communities and created a viable financial product to underwrite them.
Among all the parts of our infrastructure that are failing, our aging natural gas pipeline system must one of the most environmentally damaging. Natural gas is a much more potent global warming pollutant than carbon, and our gas pipelines continually leak, putting (literally) tons of it into the atmosphere. This paper I did with the Blue Green Alliance looked at what would happen if we accelerated the timeframe for repairing the system from 30 to 10 years. We found that it would increase GDP by $37 billion, create 250,000 more jobs, save an extra $1.5 billion worth of gas, and prevent over 80 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.
Climate Earth helps companies look at their business operations and supply chains and figure out how to minimize their environmental costs through a variety of methodologies, including natural capital accounting. I helped them refine their methodology for capturing global impacts and turning them into cost equivalents, allowing their clients to include them as part of their bottom line.
The Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan proposed to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. This study I did with ACEEE looks at the energy efficiency measures included in the plan, estimates how much global warming pollution they would avoid, what they would cost, and what the impact would be on each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the nation as a whole. We found that the efficiency measures included in the plan could reduce carbon emissions by 26%, and avoid the need to construct almost 500 new power plants by 2030. At the same time, it would increase GDP by about $17 billion and add over 600,000 new jobs to the economy.
To do this analysis we built and ran 52 simultaneous economic models so we could produce results for each state individually. It is probably the single largest modeling effort I’ve ever undertaken.
The federal tax and regulatory systems are powerful tools that can influence most any part of the economy, both intentionally and otherwise. There are a host of elements that are intended to support various types of energy production, and others that support them perhaps unwittingly. In this paper I did with the Environmental Law Institute, we tried to figure out exactly how large that support is for various fuel types.
The paper is a little old by now, and the numbers obviously out of date, but it remains one of my favorites for its breadth of coverage and depth of analysis. It also has by one of the best infographics ever made to accompany something I’ve worked on.
I wrote this paper while working at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that focuses on how various policy issues impact the economy in general, and low- and middle-class workers in particular. Part of my job there was to help a burgeoning effort between labor unions and environmental groups to find common ground on climate change. This paper was the result of years’ worth of work trying to find policies that protected both the environment as well as working families and their communities. We came up with a comprehensive suite of policies, including a price on carbon and clean energy investments, that would reduce carbon emissions by half over 20 years while boosting GDP by $150 billion and creating about 1.4 million new jobs.
This paper is another older piece of work, but I still get questions about it today. It was one of the first economic studies that showed how to address climate change while also accelerating economic and job growth. More importantly, the policies we modeled included a substantial funding of just transition programs to help workers and communities that would be negatively impacted by the shift to a low carbon economy. It helped dispel the myth that the dealing with climate change must harm the economy and that the working-class economy and the environment were inherently at odds with one another.
A lot has changed in climate economic research since we published this, but many of the key elements of the policy set we derived remain part of the foundation of smart climate climate policy proposals today.