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Empirical evaluation of the stringency and design of renewable portfolio standards

An Author Correction to this article was published on 06 February 2019

This article has been updated

Abstract

In two decades of experience with state renewable portfolio standards (RPSs), the United States has observed immense growth in renewable energy markets, initially in wind energy and more recently in solar power. During this time, RPSs have experienced considerable policy reinvention and increased diversity. Here, we explain how changes in RPS policy design features relate to different market outcomes. We develop a score for measuring RPS stringency and show that a one-point increase in RPS stringency leads to increases of 0.2%, 1% and 0.3% in renewable energy, solar generation and renewable energy capacity, respectively. Other important design features include resource eligibility, planning processes, cost recovery and geographical restrictions. These findings are then reaffirmed through 42 semi-structured phone interviews with experts in the field of RPS implementation from government agencies, including public utility commissions and state energy offices, electric utilities and various renewable energy firms and associations.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2: Measure of stringency across RPS in US states from 1997 to 2014.
Fig. 3: Change in RPS stringency score from year of inception to 2014.
Fig. 4: Timeline of adoption and revision of RPS design features from 1997 to 2014.

Code availability

The code used to generate the statistical results in the present study, applicable to STATA 14, is available from the corresponding author upon request.

Data availability

The data that support the results within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Change history

  • 06 February 2019

    In the version of this Article originally published, there was a data entry error in Table 1 for a single variable, eligibility of non-renewable resources in a renewable portfolio standard. This affected the descriptive statistics in Table 1 and Fig. 4 and the regression results and efficiency variable in Table 2. It also affects parts of the text, Table 3 and the Supplementary Information. These corrections have now been made.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge research assistance provided by J. Amadon, D. Baldwin, C. Davis, V. Luman, M. McKay, N. Mitchell, D. Olson, J. Williams, M. Williams and R. Woolston. Library research support was provided by S. Darais, R. McPhail and F. Murphy.

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Authors

Contributions

S.C. and L.L.D. conceived of the research question and gathered all quantitative data, along with research assistants. L.L.D., along with assistance, conducted the interviews. S.C. and N.Z. conducted the quantitative analyses. S.C., L.L.D., D.B.S. and N.Z. wrote the article.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sanya Carley.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethics statement

This research involved human subjects. It was approved with exempt status by the University of Utah, under protocol number 00063847. In accordance with this protocol, informed consent was provided by all study participants

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–2, Supplementary Tables 1–10, Supplementary References

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Carley, S., Davies, L.L., Spence, D.B. et al. Empirical evaluation of the stringency and design of renewable portfolio standards. Nat Energy 3, 754–763 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0202-4

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