Decarbonizing Household Consumption
Clark Gellings is known as the Father of Demand-Side Management. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, he has received awards for his contributions from EPRI, IEEE, IES, ACEEE, CIGRE, and The Alliance to Save Energy.
Ahmad Faruqui is a principal with The Brattle Group. He is an energy economist whose career has been devoted to pricing innovations. He has designed and evaluated a variety of pricing experiments in the U.S. and abroad and maintains a global database of more than three hundred tests of time-varying rates.
The production of electricity from carbon-based fossil fuels releases greenhouse gas emissions. The consumption of energy from fossil fuels also releases greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration took no actions to promote decarbonization of either production or consumption.
Several states pushed hard to decarbonize production by shifting toward wind and solar. A few also pushed hard to decarbonize consumption via energy efficiency, rooftop photovoltaics (PVs), electric vehicles, and heat pumps. We expect states will continue with these efforts and the Biden-Harris administration will take several steps to support them, regardless of what happens with Congress.
This article identifies several policies that federal and state governments can take to promote decarbonization
of consumption.
Energy Efficiency
Inefficient electric appliances should be removed from the market and natural gas equipment should be replaced with electric equipment. Consumers shy away from buying efficient equipment because it is more expensive, not readily available, and they often don't know it exists.