Federal and state governments provide a wide array of direct and indirect subsidies to many energy supply technologies. Since these subsidies affect the economic competitiveness of different energy sources, it is important to develop objective and accurate estimates of their magnitude. Funds from this grant support work by Frank Wolak, a senior energy economist at Stanford, to develop a standardized schema for the categorization of different forms of government subsidy. Wolak will then collaborate with other leading energy economists to apply this framework and undertake a series of technology-specific analyses that will quantify the extent of subsidies provided to various energy sources, such as coal, natural gas, oil, wind, solar, and nuclear. All participating researchers will then convene at a workshop to review and compare each of these analyses and suggest areas of improvement. Finally, Wolak will develop a general equilibrium model that extends the results of these source-specific subsidy analyses and accounts for interactions between subsidies for different energy sources. He will consider, for example, how changes in the subsidies provided for wind power impact subsidies provided for other energy sources, such as oil or gas. This general equilibrium methodology will be the subject of a second review workshop, and the whole project will culminate in a series of final conferences that will lay out the ultimate findings for researchers and policymakers.

The answers to a host of pressing questions in energy policy, such as how best to help consumers use electricity more efficiently or where to site new electricity distribution infrastructure, depend crucially on a nuanced understanding of how consumers use electricity and how that demand differs from household to household. New opportunities to study differences in household electricity consumption have arisen in recent years thanks to the increasingly widespread installation of smart electricity meters that track household energy use at finely grained intervals, in some cases measuring energy consumption as frequently as every 15 minutes. Partnering with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Michael Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, plans to explore household electricity usage patterns by integrating ERCOT’s 15?minute residential smart meter data with other relevant data sets, such as local tax records, demographic statistics, meteorological data, and locational marginal pricing information. Webber has identified a set of initial hypotheses to be tested through an examination of the integrated data set, including how energy use varies with income, time of day across different locations in Texas, and the introduction of demand response programs. Funds from this grant will help Webber and his team take in the over 45 terabytes of ERCOT smart meter data, suitably anonymize the data set, merge it with additional information sources, and disseminate it for use by other researchers.

This grant funds an annual three-day seminar, hosted by Columbia University’s Center on Global and Energy Policy (CGEP), that aims to train and inform journalists tasked with covering multifaceted developments in energy economics, energy markets, energy geopolitics, and energy innovation. Using active discussion and interactive modules, the seminars will introduce participating journalists to emerging research findings on a broad number of complex topics, including oil price volatility, solar energy, and shale gas development, presented by leading experts from academia, industry, and government. Approximately 15 journalists will be selected to participate each year through a competitive application process and selected participants will be asked to commit to producing a substantial number of articles that reflect the training program’s focus on providing a multidisciplinary view of key energy issues.

Transportation accounts for a large fraction of both U.S. petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and continues to be an important contributor to local concentrations of nitrogen oxide and ozone. This grant funds a project by Resources for the Future (RFF) that will examine and assess consumer demand for low-carbon vehicles, be they electric cars or nonelectric cars with high fuel economy ratings. Partnering with Maritz CX Research, a private market research firm with detailed information on individual consumer purchasing decisions of new vehicles and their attributes, the RFF team will analyze more than five years of records related to how consumers make decisions about vehicle purchases, totaling nearly one million observations of car purchasing decisions. While this remains a small fraction of total domestic car purchases over that time period, the data set is larger and of higher quality than any publicly available data source that has been explored in the transportation economics literature to date. RFF will examine this rich data set by exploring how consumers value low-carbon vehicle attributes, consumer demand for innovations in the electric vehicle market, and the interactions between fuel prices and greenhouse gas mitigation standards that have been set for the transportation sector.