Showing posts with label environmental policies US. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmental policies US. Show all posts

Sunday, November 18, 2018

17/11/2018: California Rooftop Solar Mandate: An example of bad groupthink?


In recent news, California legislators have done a gimmick-trick that has earned the state loud applause from the environmentally-minded consumers and activists: California Energy Commission (CEC) recently voted 5-0 to add a new provision to the state’s building code. This includes a requirement that from 2020, all new house and multi-family residences construction of three stories or fewer, along with all major renovations, must be built with rooftop solar panels. Given that the state currently builds ca 113,000 housing units a year, and rising, this should increase significantly already existent solar generation capacity from 15% of the housing stock, currently.

Solar being mandated on virtually all new houses? Sounds like a renewables nirvana, especially given the fact that the state has huge solar generation potential due to its climate. But, as commonly is the case, there is a catch. Or two... or many more... And this means that California's latest policy mandate may be a poor example to follow, and potentially, a bad policy mistake.

Here are the key reasons.

Rooftop solar is about as effective in reducing emissions as waving a broom into the smog. UC Berkeley’s Severin Borenstein argued this in his note to CEC Commissioner (http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/borenste/cecweisenmiller180509.pdf). Note: Borenstein also alleges that CEC has failed to involve experts in energy economics in its decision making process - something that is not a good policy formation practice.

UC Davis economics professor James Bushnell accused CEC of “regulatory groupthink.” (https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/how-should-we-use-our-roofs/) and offered an alternative to roof solar that can generate far greater environmental benefits. There are, of course, other, more efficient ways for deriding emissions, including: mandating more urban density, raising home and cars efficiency standards, expanding the renewable energy mandate, improving grid efficiencies and transmission expansion, and so on. Once again, CEC did not allow for any independent assessment of the proposed plans economic and environmental impacts.

There is an opportunity cost involved in roof solar: California has a state-wide mandate to achieve 50% renewables generation by 2030. Putting more if this target onto roof solar is simply moving generation capacity from one source to the other. Because too top solar is roughly 4-6 times more expensive than industrially-produced renewables, the substitution involves a dramatic reduction in economics of scale. This will raise the overall cost to California of reaching its 2030 target.

Another opportunity cost, this time much more tangible and immediate than 2030 targets is the problem of California grid ability to swallow all the solar generation being put into place. California has to routinely dump excess solar energy supplies during peak generation times, because it is failing to find buyers outside the state. Worse, given the scale of each roof top generation unit, solar electricity from the roof tops cannot be controlled by the grid companies, because smart inverters needed to do this are too expensive for small scale generators.

There is an argument, however, that economics of scale will kick in from a different side: mandating such a huge increase in atomistic (house-level) installations can result in more innovation and lower costs of new technologies going forward. This means that while costs might be high up front, they can potentially be deflated faster over time than absent the mandate. The same argument might hold for improvements in storage.

Worse yet, solar from one roof panel household competes with solar from another roof panel household. All roof top panels generating at virtually the same time across the same time zone state will be simply bidding down the cost of solar during peak generation, not peak demand. Here is an exchange from two experts on this:



Last, but not least, California roof top solar requirements will add new cost, to the housing in a state that is already in the middle of an atrocious housing crisis. CEC own analysis, not tested by any peer review, implies that homeowners are likely to face additional costs of ca $8,000-12,000. Over the depreciation cycle for housing stock, this is likely to translate into $15,600-$23,400 in current dollars (inflation-adjusted, using 2% inflation rate) increase in the cost of housing per household, once property taxes on new build values are factored in. With average house price in California in excess of $420,000, this is equivalent to raising house prices 3.75-5.57 percent. Of course, CEC promises savings that, according the Commission analysis will be net of higher costs. Problem is, no one actually tested these claims, and we simply do not know how the costs of switching all this roof top solar into the grid are going to be distributed across the households.

Macro level view:

Then there is macro level analysis of the solar energy benefits and costs. And California does not come out pretty in this.

A new NBER paper, tiled "Heterogeneous Environmental and Grid Benefits from Rooftop Solar and the Costs of Inefficient Siting Decisions" by Steven E. Sexton, A. Justin Kirkpatrick, Robert Harris, Nicholas Z. Muller (NBER WP 25241, Nov. 2018: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25241.pdf) looked at "federal and state policies in the U.S." These policies "subsidize electricity generation from 1.4 million rooftop solar arrays because of pollution avoidance benefits and grid congestion relief. Yet because these benefits vary across the U.S. according to solar irradiance, technologies of electricity generators, and grid characteristics, the value of these benefits, and, consequently, the optimal subsidy, are largely unknown."

What does this mean? Across the U.S., "policy, therefore, is unlikely to have induced efficient solar investments." The authors provide "the first systematic, theoretically consistent, and empirically valid estimates of pollution damages avoidable by solar capacity in each U.S. zip code". The also link "these external benefits to subsidy levels in each U.S. state, and [estimate] the share of these benefits that spillover to other states." Finally, the authors measure "the energy value of capacity across the U.S. and the value of transmission congestion relief in California."

So what do they find? "Environmental benefits are shown to vary considerably across the U.S., and to largely spillover to neighboring states." Which is not a bad thing in itself, but it also means that some states pay for benefits accruing to other states. These transfers are not voluntary to the payers for solar - the households.

Furthermore, "subsidy levels are essentially uncorrelated with environmental benefits contributing to installed capacity that sacrifices approximately $1 billion per year in environmental benefits." Which, broadly-speaking means that subsidies for rooftop solar are not a great way to achieve environmental benefits.

"...California rooftop solar is shown to generate no congestion relief." Or, as noted above, there are severe grid-related costs involved in rooftop solar in California, the state that decided to mandate it.



Putting more detail on the NBER paper: "Total benefits of solar generation—inclusive of energy values — are estimated to be greatest in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. They are least in the West, and particularly the West Coast, where approximately two-thirds of systems are located." Why, given the fact that sunshine is more abundant in California than in the MidWest or Mid-Atlantic?


"These differences are primarily attributable to heterogeneity in marginal responding fossil generation." Oh, wait, that is right: the more solar you put in, the more back up generation you need. And that is before you account for the solar installation possible effects of increasing demand for electricity as the second order effect.

"In California, we find no evidence that rooftop solar capacity systematically relieves congestion. Approximately two-thirds of the 900,000 rooftop solar arrays is located upstream from transmission bottlenecks, contributing to congestion rather than relieving it. If capacity were efficiently allocated, congestion relief benefits in California would have been no more than $15 million in 2017—approximately 7% of total energy value."

Cycle back to that California rooftop solar mandate. Does it really make any environmental sense? Because economics-wise, it does not appear to offer much more than a hype and a pump scheme.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Economics 26/12/2009: Green differences - EU vs US

An interesting piece of research came across my desk recently from Quant Express (can't find any links to this) which sites nVision Research data on attitudes to environment. The most interesting aspects of it, from my point of view, is the slightly psychotic nature of analysis which first accuses Americans of being environmentally backward relative to Europeans, then shows that they are actually environmentally ahead of the average EU27 and within the top performers in the EU15... Enjoy...

Chart above is claimed to represent just how far behind American consumers are from their more environmentally conscious European counterparts. But here is an interesting thingy - do these answers actually support such a conclusion?

Take question 1: Companies should be penalized for failing to care for the environment. Since no conditioning references are given to the legal nature of such a failure, one can assume two possible meanings - (A) "Companies should be penalized for failing to care for the environment over and above the confines of the law" and (B) "Companies should be penalized for failing to care for the environment within confines of what is allowed by law".

In case (A), the question asks whether companies should be penalized for carrying out legally permissible actions, in case (B) for carrying out legally prohibited actions.

If you live in a society with well-protected legal rights and directly accountable judiciary, you would be more likely to lend no support to case (A) while case (B) will be trivially true. If you live in a society where that which is not prohibited explicitly is permissible, as the US, you would say No.

In EU, where judiciary is far less directly accountable and laws are often more arbitrarily and less transparently imposed and politically intertwined with ethics and even aesthetics, a person would more likely to assume that the question refers to case (B), which supports an answer 'Yes'.

How great is the margin of difference between two? Is it enough to erase most of the difference shown so 'conclusively' in the graph? I don't know.

Take question 3 which also links up to question 6. If air travel is a more accepted mode of transport
  • within a given geography (which, of course, is a function of geophysics - more conducive to supporting air travel over larger territories, like the US than over more compact and less internally mobile regions, such as Europe)
  • as well as cultures (with the marginal value of time higher in the US than in Europe), and
  • demographics (younger countries are more mobile),
both questions will warrant fewer 'Yes' votes. Has this anything to do with environmental attitudes? Or has it more to do with balancing out the cost to the environment with the cost to quality of life? Is it a decision on the margin or a decision on the absolute?

Why does air travel warranted two out of six questions in the entire set? Because it contributes more CO2s than other? No, airlines account for roughly 2-3% of the total global CO2 emissions. And this combines domestic air travel and international air travel. And yet they managed to get 33% of the entire questionnaire.

The key here is the idea of the airlines as being a perfect target for a tax. The logic here is to charge passengers to change their behaviour.

There is problem however, with the question as it assumes that higher taxes mean lower emissions. This might be what passes for prohibitions-based economics in Europe and the UK, but it might not be consistent with what Americans might think about positive and negative incentives.

Americans generally think of going for the Big Return measures/investments first, and only later for the marginal measures. Hence, the lack of support for Kyoto in the US, given that it excludes some of the world's largest polluters - like China. Europeans always prefer going for the 'cute' policies - the Alessi Environmentalism of cute and loud NGO-supported and advanced-marketing measures.

And Americans might be right in their approach. Switching, say, 20% of China's electricity production into nuclear might actually do more good to the environment than banning all air travel outright. Americans would know this. Europeans (save for the French) would not, as anti-nuclear hysteria of the 1980s has spelled taboo on public debates on nuclear energy in most of Europe throughout the previous two decades. Or switching world coal powered stations to clean coal. Or using advanced capture and sequestration technologies to remove CO2 emissions, or using smart approach to managing existent systems rather than blindly building windmills and setting excessively populist targets. All of these more efficient applications are spearheaded by the US. Not by Europe.

There is another aspect to the questions - as a younger society, America is much more mobile than Europe. And it is the younger generations that hold power in determining mobility-focused legislative initiatives there. In Europe, older generations are immobile and they hold political power. So taxing younger Italians and Frenchmen and Spanish women moving between their jobs and home or to study abroad is kosher for European populace, because life in Europe is about preserving status quo of wealth distribution (old hold all, young hold none, when it comes to capital and income).

How do I know that the above figures are simply bonkers when it comes to assessing the environmental attitudes of Americans relative to Europeans and Britons? Well, the same research group found that:

"From a list of twelve behaviours – including washing clothes at lower temperatures and avoiding products with excess packaging – we have defined a consumer as behaving in a distinctly green manner if they do at least six. Under this definition we find that 43% of Americans are seriously green compared to 53% of Britons and just 29% of Europeans. In fact, the whole environmental trend has held together well over the course of the downturn with slight increases in the propensity to engage in green behaviour in Britain and America and flat
growth in Europe."

So let me run through this quickly - charts above show Europeans to be about as 'green' as the UK, with Americans lagging far behind. The numbers above show this to be untrue. And despite the US consumers changing their behavior most dramatically during the downturn, their propensity to behave green has not diminished.

"Our European figures mask significant regional variation. For example, 59% of Danish consumers qualify as green under our definition compared to just 13% of Hungarians. The
proportion of 43% in the United States means that the popularity of environmental behavior
there is most similar to that found in the Netherlands or France." Ahem, so environmentally lagging Americans are just as good/bad as environmentally sound Netherlands and France?..

And this is more than just words. "If we examine whether or not consumers who say they are environmentally friendly do actually behave in a green way, we see some interesting transnational patterns. The map below shows the proportion of consumers who say they are concerned about what they personally can do to help the environment who also behave in a green way under our definition."
Note: I have no idea as to how they managed to mark Ireland as the best-performing country in the entire sample. I guess they thought our travel tax (and DAA extortionate charges), plus Carbon Tax and VRT - all of which have nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with fueling the Exchequer coffers - mean that we are 'green'...

"As you can see, the British Isles and the Nordic nations lead the way in terms of “practising
what they preach” but the United States is not too far behind. It is most of Central, Eastern
and Southern Europe that really lag behind; in Spain, for example, only 13% of those who
claim to be motivated by eco-concerns actually go beyond this and behave in a measurably
green fashion."

So what's the EU average 'greeness', then? Above the US or below? Given the US is not far behind the leaders within the EU?..

Hmmm... it all started with telling us just how environmentally backward Americans are...