Above: During a House Natural Resource Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Dave Min (D-CA) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about investments into energy.
Below:
During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about wind farms.
MIT Sloan School of Management:
“We find that RPS mandates have virtually zero impact on prices, and utility-scale renewables are actually associated with lower retail rates,” said Christopher Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor and Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability at MIT Sloan, and faculty director of the MIT Climate Policy Center. “Energy generated by large-scale solar plants, for example, comes with lower transmission, distribution, and maintenance costs for utilities, and these efficiencies can be passed on to the consumer.”
Renewables and Electricity Affordability, MIT:
Using a panel of U.S. states and a fixed-effects econometric design, we test whether these apparent correlations persist after controlling for time-invariant state characteristics and common temporal shocks. We find that once both state and year effects are included, the association between RPS stringency and retail electricity prices disappears, suggesting that the raw correlation is not causal. Utility-scale wind and solar generation are, if anything, weakly associated with lower prices. Rooftop solar adoption, however, remains positively correlated with rates, likely due to cost-recovery mechanisms embedded in retail tariffs. Beyond renewables, there are two additional factors that may be driving rate increases: climate-driven grid hardening and the rapid growth of data centers. Recent work suggests climate change is a factor; our ongoing work studies the role of data centers. These results highlight the need for equitable rate design and targeted resilience investments rather than a retrenchment of renewable policy.
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Below, graph from Mark Jacobson shows the the relationship between the percentage of state-wide grids that are renewable and residential electricity prices.
Mark Z Jacobson, PhD, Stanford University:
Graph from CBS News below uses data from Lazard.
