The Political Economy of Green Energy Policy

Catalog description

This course is about the changing economics and politics of energy policy in the presence of climate change, with a special emphasis on regulating electricity prices and setting performance standards for technologies that generate and use electricity. Decarbonizing energy use and dealing with resilience and reliability challenges arising from more extreme weather have complicated the already difficult task of governing electricity supply. We first discuss political and economic theories of why and when regulation is imposed. We then explore the relationship among elected officials who enact energy policy legislation, agencies that implement these policies, courts that enforce agency decisions, and entities that are the targets of energy policies and seek to influence them. Case studies of successful and unsuccessful regulation in environmental regulation generally and in climate policy specifically are discussed. The goal of the class is to provide an understanding of how institutions determine the effectiveness of energy policies. Prerequisite: calculus-based course in microeconomics (at least Economics 50 or equivalent).