Driving energy: the enactment and ambitiousness of state renewable energy policy

Abstract

U.S. states have led the federal government in instituting policies aimed at promoting renewable energy. Nearly all research on renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) has treated RPS adoption as a binary choice. Given the substantial variation in the renewable energy goals established by RPSs, we propose a new measure of RPS ambition that accounts for the amount of additional renewable energy production needed to reach the RPS goal and the number of years allotted to reach the standard. By measuring RPS policy with more precision, our analysis demonstrates that many factors found to affect whether a state will adopt an RPS do not exert a similar effect on the policy’s ambitiousness. Most notably, our analysis demonstrates that Democratic control of the state legislature is the most consequential factor in determining the ambitiousness of state RPS policies.

Governing Complexity: Recent Developments in Environmental Politics and Policy

“…The results of their study were significantly different from other state-level analyses because of their more nuanced measurements. For example, other analyses have found little or no impact of political party control of the legislature, whereas Berry et al (2015) found it to be significant.…”

“…Several scholars developed stronger quantitative measures of complex environmental policies. In their study of U.S. state renewable energy policies, Berry, Laird, and Stefes () demonstrated that more precise dependent variables are necessary to capture important dynamics like the effectiveness of state renewable energy targets and the influence of partisan control of state legislatures. They developed a variable that takes into account the presence or absence of a policy, the ambitiousness of the policy goal, and the timeframe for a state to reach their goal.…”

Opposing Energy Transitions: Modeling the Contested Nature of Energy Transitions in the Electricity Sector

“…2 For a similar similar framework that takes a more global view and considers cross-country interactions, see Aklin and Urpelainen (2018). 3 For a quantitative analysis of renewable energy policies at the subnational level in the United States, see Berry, Laird, and Stefes (2015). And for a thorough account see Karapin (2016).…”

Multiple Streams in Hawaii: How the Aloha State Adopted a 100% Renewable Portfolio Standard

“…More recently, Carley, Nicholson‐Crotty et al () use both dyadic analysis and EHA to explore the differences in internal and external determinants of different stages of diffusion. Other studies have attempted to capture more nuanced differences between states’ RPS policies by including the measures of RPS ambition or stringency (Berry, Laird, & Stefes, ; Carley & Miller, ).…”

“…While much has been learned from these studies, the results are sometimes inconsistent. For example, while a number of studies find citizen ideology to be a significant predictor of RPS adoption (Berry et al, ; Carley & Miller, ; Matisoff, ), other studies focus on government ideology with inconsistent results (Carley, Nicholson‐Crotty, et al, ; Lyon & Yin, ). Furthermore, there is wide variation regarding the extent to which combined renewable energy potential, or wind or solar potential, is a significant predictor of adoption (Carley, Nicholson‐Crotty, & Miller, ; Lyon & Yin, ; Matisoff, ).…”