Carbon Capture is Messy and Fraught - But Might Be Essential
Who would pay for a company to sequester carbon underground? MIT economist Christopher Knittel discusses a potential solution in a Wired article here.
Dynamic Competition and Arbitrage in Electricity Markets: The Role of Financial Players
Market power is typically an important concern in restructured electricity markets. This paper shows that financial traders, who trade alongside physical buyers and sellers, can increase competitiveness and lead to lower consumer prices by effectively competing with generators and restricting their market power.
Energy Efficiency, Information, and the Acceptability of Rent Increases
In this paper, the authors explore role of imperfect information and attentional biases in the context of energy efficiency investments by quantifying how alternative informational interventions affect tenants' acceptance of rent increases in exchange for improved energy efficiency of their heating appliance.
Does the U.S. Export Global Warming? Coal Trade and the Shale Gas Boom
Christopher Knittel, Konstantinos Metaxoglou, Anson Soderbery and Andre Trindade examine the effect of the US Shale Gas Boom on global trade, consumption of coal, and CO2 emissions and the results show that the total quantity of coal traded around in the absence of the Boom is essentially the same as the actual...
Fair, Equitable, and Efficient Tariffs in the Presence of DERs
In a new CEEPR Working Paper, the authors delineate various aspects of equity and fairness that regulators must grapple with when designing electricity tariffs and show that more economically efficient tariffs can improve several aspects of equity. The research argues that DER adoption under existing tariff schemes may increase inequities already present in the power system.
Coordinating Separate Markets for Externalities
In a new CEEPR Working Paper, the authors show that inefficiencies from having separate markets to correct an environmental externality are significantly mitigated when firms participate in an integrated product market, using data from an integrated wholesale electricity market.
Who Closes First? Ownership and Collusive Early Exits
Climate and energy policies lead to a declining market for the incumbent technologies in electricity markets. Facing the challenge of closures, incumbent firms have incentives to coordinate closures through cross-ownership to achieve a collusive phase-out. For the Nordic nuclear industry, a quantification shows a highly distorted phase-out, both for the consumer surplus and the environment.
In The News
Oct 9, 2018
Carbon tax debate: Nobels and IPCC vs. Trump and Doug Ford
In an article in Grist, Professor Christopher Knittel comments on the carbon tax debate. Read the full article here.
Jun 4, 2018
Measuring Savings from Fault Detection and Diagnostics
Data analytics will play a major role in advancing global energy efficiency and high performance building goals nationally and globally. As the fault detection and diagnostics industry emerges and...
May 9, 2018
We don’t know what climate change will cost — that doesn’t mean we can ignore it
Professor Robert S. Pindyck of MIT and Professor James H. Stock of Harvard University discuss the importance of the social cost of carbon in a new piece on TheHill.
Mar 20, 2018
Restructuring Revisited: Competition and Coordination in Electricity Distribution Systems
In light of the decentralization of the power sector, a new CEEPR Working Paper carefully considers how industry structure regulations impacts competition, market development, and the efficiency of...
Mar 7, 2018
Power Sector Reform and Corruption: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
In this paper, the authors conduct an econometric analysis of the performance of reforms in terms of efficiency, welfare, and economic development in 47 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa between 2002...
Feb 2, 2018
3 Questions: Transforming our Electric Power System
Christopher Knittel and Francis O'Sullivan, co-directors of the MITEI LCEC for Electric Power Systems Research, are exploring cleaner, more reliable, and more cost-effective solutions.
Feb 7, 2018
Reforming Electricity Markets for the Transition: Emerging Lessons from the UK's Bold Experiment
In 2013, the UK introduced radical market reform to meet the new challenges - a change which some critics denounced as a return to central planning, whilst others feared the costs. The results to...