This article uses hourly electricity consumption data from the PJM Interconnection in the United States and stay-at-home metrics from cell phone location data to study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on electricity consumption using a difference-in-predicted-differences strategy. I show that while in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic total electricity consumption declined by…
Volume 12
Vehicle-to-grid Policy in South Africa: State-led v. Market-directed Approaches
The Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) policy aim has been widely analyzed in policy planning literature but has not been explored for adaptation to African contexts. African countries enjoy immense renewable energy (RE) potential but currently experience minimal electric vehicle usage, since most drivers confront limited charging station access and thus range anxiety. One potential workaround surmounting this…
Cheap Money, Geopolitics and Supernormal Backwardation of the WTI Forward Curve
Financial speculators frequently trade in the most liquid short-tenor contracts. We study repeating patterns of sharply steepening slopes in the WTI forward curve to investigate whether, after controlling for macroeconomic variables, physical market fundamentals, and basic arbitrage, calendar spread behavior is partly explained by speculation related to assessed geopolitical risk. We estimate WTI forward curve…
Who’s Responsible for Climate Change? New Evidence Based on Country-level Estimates of Climate Debt
In this paper we discuss the concept of climate debt, which measures the cumulative economic damages due to CO2 emissions. We find that the climate debt (estimated for 131 countries) is extremely large, equaling some $59 trillion over the 1959–2018 period. Climate debt is also substantial relative to other government liabilities; in the G-20, it…