Research
Will Subsidies for Distributed Solar Preempt Investment in Large-Scale Solar Farms? (2021 Job Market Paper)
Subsidies for solar power incentivize the installation of large utility-scale solar farms and smaller systems distributed on the rooftops of homes and businesses. Distributed and utility-scale solar are close substitutes, so subsidizing distributed solar may undercut investment in solar farms, which are more efficient and less costly to install. Therefore, subsidies which target distributed solar may be inefficient or ineffective at reducing pollution. To study this tradeoff, I employ a flexible model of hourly unit-level electricity production and wholesale electricity prices in the Texas electricity market to estimate a representative electric utility's long-run marginal benefit curve for utility-scale solar capacity. The model approximates the inter-temporal effects of generator startup costs and ramping constraints, and predicts realistic generator responses to increased solar capacity without solving a computationally expensive dynamic programming problem. I show that distributed solar will increasingly undercut demand for utility-scale as solar costs decline. At 2015 costs for solar, the marginal megawatt of distributed solar capacity in Texas would abate over 1000 tons of CO2 per year on average, and would not crowd out investment in utility scale solar. However, at the projected 2026 cost of solar, the marginal megawatt of distributed solar will crowd out .375 megawatts of utility-scale solar, and net annual CO2 abatement will be reduced to 317 tons.
When Do Incentive Programs Increase Solar Adoption Among Low-income Households? (With Chien-fei Chen, Gerald Jones Jr., Scott Holladay, Charles Sims, & Xiaojing Xu)
Rooftop solar adoption has increased considerably in recent years thanks to a combination of lower panel costs and generous incentive programs. Subsidies, net metering, leasing programs, and property-tax benefits designed to lower the costs and increase the benefits of adoption have increased adoption overall but have had mixed results on adoption equity. This paper investigates the distributional implications of policies designed to increase rooftop solar adoption in the U.S. We utilize a dataset of census tract-level rooftop solar adoption compiled using a machine learning-based image classification tool that identifies solar photovoltaic panels from satellite images of most of the continental U.S. This allows us to extend our analysis to areas of the country that have lower solar adoption rates and incomes than areas previously studied. We find evidence that low-income assistance programs designed specifically for low- and medium-income households have helped close the gap between low- and high-income solar adoption. However, property-tax benefits and net metering, which are far more prevalent across the U.S., are associated with an increase in the gap between low- and high-income solar adoption.
Other Work In Progress:
Optimal Battery Placement and Transmission Constraints: A Spatial Dynamic Model of Electricity Production and Storage (With Scott Holladay, Ben Meadows, & Charles Sims)
Ramsey Pricing by Electric Utilities when Rooftop Solar is an Option: Studying Welfare and Distribution Effects using an Agent Based Model (with Gasser Galal Ali)
What is Driving the Rising Costs of Building Electricity Transmission? (with Fisher Latham)
Risk-Return Portfolios in Electricity Generation and the Energy Transition: Risks of a Green Bubble