The Era of State Energy Policy Innovation: A Review of Policy Instruments

Abstract

U.S. energy and climate policy has evolved from the bottom‐up, led by state governments, and internationally recognized for the use of unconventional and innovative policy instruments. This study focuses on policy instruments adopted throughout the era of state energy policy innovation that aim to diversify, decentralize, and decarbonize the electricity sector. Specific attention is devoted to the renewable portfolio standard, net metering, interconnection standards, tax incentives, public benefit funds, and energy efficiency resource standards. This analysis synthesizes the findings from the energy policy literature and provides a summary of the current state of understanding about the effects of various state energy policy instruments, and concludes with a discussion of broader trends that have emerged from the use of policy instruments in the state energy policy innovation era.

State Renewable Energy Governance: Policy Instruments, Markets, or Citizens

“…As the number of state level renewable energy policies has increased, so have policy analyses and evaluations focusing on individual programs (Carley, 2009;Delmas and MontesSancho, 2011;Delmas, Montes-Sancho, and Shimshack, 2010;Menz and Vachon, 2006;Shrimali and Kniefel, 2011;Yin and Powers, 2010). Studies (Carley, 2011) have reviewed the innovation and evolvement of several prominent state renewable energy policies and gave insights of policy effects by putting previous empirical findings together. However, an effort is still needed to synthesize comprehensive trends of renewable energy policies and to analyze what type of government approach works better than others under the current setting of the renewable energy markets.…”

Visualization of International Energy Policy Research

“…According to the analytical framework described in Figure 1, a specific mode is set (i.e., time slice = 5; citation threshold (c), co-citation threshold (cc), and co-citation coefficient threshold (ccv) = (2, 3, 15), (3,3,20), (3,3,20); the rest of the time value is determined by linear interpolation) and operated to get the visualized distribution of the co-citation network using the data collected in Section 2 (i.e., 10,222 records/articles from the WOS) ( Figure 3). Energy technology research reached its peak with the advent of the Stabilization Wedges Theory [27] and other related studies [28,29].…”

“…Several efforts are highlighted by four broad strands of research regarding energy policy review: one strand in the literature focuses on reviewing the development and achievement of energy policies in a country, region, state, union, or sector [1][2][3][4][5]; the second stream discusses regulations and their corresponding outcomes as they relate to specific energy forms (e.g., oil, gas, electricity) worldwide [6,7]; another area of research is the applications and effects of different types of policy frameworks for energy regulation [8]; and the last group of research compares the features of energy governance in different countries [9]. Although such studies reveal certain aspects of energy policy studies, little comprehensive research has been done so far to identify the structure and transition of the evolution of the topic from a broad, global, historical and quantitative perspective.…”

Understanding the Human Factor of the Energy Transition: Mechanisms Underlying Energy-Relevant Decisions and Behaviors

“…However, in the field of energy policy research, most analyses focus on the aggregated societal, economic, environmental, and technological effects of certain energy policy schemes (e.g., Lewis and Wiser, 2007;Lipp, 2007;Carley, 2011;Delmas and Montes-Sancho, 2011). Only a few contributions are specifically concerned with the political steering of ECB (e.g., Lindén et al, 2006;Gyberg and Palm, 2009).…”