Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Electricity Markets: Complex Modern Issues Confronting the Sector

(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

Energy and climate policy represent imposing challenges for policy-makers, practitioners, and other stakeholders. This field is complex, offering numerous possible policy levers to address a wide array of environmental and economic problems. In designing policies, decision-makers must anticipate both intended and unintended effects of the legal and regulatory environment they create. These effects can vary across time and occur at multiple spatial scales, along many dimensions, and in non-obvious ways. Policy analysis, then, requires an ever-larger toolbox for understanding the effectiveness and broader implications of energy and climate policy. To that end, researchers have developed a number of computationally-intense modeling frameworks. These tools seek to inform policy-making by reducing the uncertainty surrounding energy and climate policy through reliance on the best available evidence about energy systems, including fine-grained data. This panel presents four papers that apply advanced modeling techniques in energy and climate policy analysis. These projects provide opportunities to sample the breadth of recent advances in energy policy modeling approaches; to compare and contrast the capabilities of each, including potentials and limitations; and to learn how such policy analysis can inform the policy-making process. Apart from illustrating methods, these papers also provide valuable insight into current research on energy and climate policies, touching on carbon taxation, clean energy standards, and the promotion of solar photovoltaics. This panel represents one half of a two-part series on the improvement of modeling platforms to inform the evaluation and design of energy and climate policies. While this panel will focus on the application of systems models as a source of evidence-based policy research, the other panel will focus on methodological approaches to building and enhancing the models themselves. The two sessions complement one another as parts of a larger sequence on the improvement of systems models for policy design. However, either panel will, by itself, provide attendees with a diverse array of perspectives and findings that will clarify the relevance and usefulness of systems modeling approaches in energy and climate policy research. Both panels will engage perspectives from multiple academic disciplines as well as those of practitioners with direct experience in the use and development of computational models to inform public policy.