Essays in renewable energy and emissions trading

Environmental issues have become a key political issue over the past forty years and has resulted in the enactment of many different environmental policies. The three essays in this dissertation add to the literature of renewable energy policies and sulfur dioxide emissions trading.;The first essay ascertains which state policies are accelerating deployment of non-hydropower renewable electricity generation capacity into a states electric power industry. As would be expected, policies that lead to significant increases in actual renewable capacity in that state either set a Renewables Portfolio Standard with a certain level of required renewable capacity or use Clean Energy Funds to directly fund utility-scale renewable capacity construction. A surprising result is that Required Green Power Options, a policy that merely requires all utilities in a state to offer the option for consumers to purchase renewable energy at a premium rate, has a sizable impact on non-hydro renewable capacity in that state.;The second essay studies the theoretical impacts fuel contract constraints have on an electricity generating unit's compliance costs of meeting the emissions compliance restrictions set by Phase I of the Title IV SO2 Emissions Trading Program. Fuel contract constraints restrict a utility's degrees of freedom in coal purchasing options, which can lead to the use of a more expensive compliance option and higher compliance costs.;The third essay analytically and empirically shows how fuel contract constraints impact the emissions allowance market and total electric power industry compliance costs. This paper uses generating unit-level simulations to replicate results from previous studies and show that fuel contracts appear to explain a large portion (65%) of the previously unexplained compliance cost simulations. Also, my study considers a more appropriate plant-level decisions for compliance choices by analytically analyzing the plant level decision-making process to show how cost-minimization at the more complex plant level may deviate from cost-minimization at the generating unit level.