Research

The US government has set a nationwide target for 100% clean electricity by 2035 and reliable hydropower is key to achieving that goal, especially in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). However, droughts are a threat and increasing in intensity and frequency due to climate change. In this paper, I estimate the causal impact of high-intensity droughts between 2012-2021 on hydroelectricity generation in the PNW. Using 10 years of plant-level data and county-level measures of drought that are more comprehensive than those widely used in the literature, I find a 23% decrease in generation of an average hydropower plant if an entire county is hit by such droughts. This result, showing the vulnerability of this region’s most abundant clean energy source to high-intensity droughts is robust across a range of specifications and drought definitions, including an alternative unit of analysis at the plant-catchment area-month level. Further, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests substantial additional social costs of increased carbon emissions generated from the replacement of the lost hydropower by fossil fuels. Disaggregating the overall effect to examine heterogeneous impacts indicates that high-intensity droughts negatively impact large capacity plants, run-of-river operations, and summer generation more severely. Comparing two major drought events, 2015 and 2021, suggests that the severity of impact also varies by drought prevalence. My findings carry important implications for electricity suppliers in the region and policymakers thinking about future hydropower development in light of the 100% goal.

Utilizing a hypothetical experiment embedded within an online survey of Indian households, this study examines the effectiveness of two types of behavioral interventions – “collective identity” priming and social norms – on water use decisions. We find that individuals who are exposed to the prime, followed by a weak social norm (prosocial message without a social comparison), are 28% more likely to invest in a plumbing inspection and 11% more likely to increase engagement in daily water conservation behaviors. Our results point towards the complementary nature of priming and social norm nudging. Furthermore, we find evidence that the monetary costs of conservation measures may act as a deterrent to nudges. Our analysis also reveals heterogeneity in the effectiveness of the behavioral treatment based on individual characteristics and residence type, which underscores the importance of targeting such interventions. Given that the Indian culture is inherently collectivistic towards family and community values, our findings suggest a promising policy tool for residential water conservation in India.

In today’s United States, the dependence on electricity in people’s daily lives makes it imperative to “keep the lights on”. However, with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events induced by climate change, sustained power outages are becoming more common. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the resilience of electric utilities to severe weather events, as indicated by the length of the average restoration time, conditional on a power outage occurring. Using a quadratic two-way fixed effects panel data model with annual utility-level Customer Average Interruption Duration Index data and county-level (aggregated to state-level) Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster declarations data, preliminary results indicate about a 40-minute increase in the average restoration time by a utility due to weather-related disasters in a state during an average year. This, at the mean of such events, implies a 19-minute increase in restoration time with each additional severe event. Moreover, the marginal increase of an additional severe weather event is significant up till the seventh event. Stratifying the sample by utility ownership suggests that investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and electric cooperatives drive these results. Plausible explanations are the cost build-ups due to lack of federal pre- and post- disaster funding opportunities to IOUs, and the rural infrastructure and limited resources for grid resilience for electric cooperatives