جانشینی در صنعت برق: مقایسه بین منطقه ای در شرق ایالات متحده

The electric power industry is restructuring as regulations move from states to regional and national levels. Estimates of regional fuel and input substitution are essential for practitioners and policy makers. This paper estimates substitution under static and dynamic scenarios, examining changes in technology and total factor productivity from 2001 to 2008. Two-stage estimation reveals regional characteristics and underlying elements in fuel and factor choice processes. Substitution varies widely depending on the region, coal technology, capital investment, and R&D activities.

Energy plays a crucial role in the global economy and will become the major economic issue of the coming century. A variety of policies have been initiated to promote improvements in energy efficiency and encourage development of alternative energy resources. The electric power industry is one of the largest consumers of fossil-fuel energy. Given the potential for substitution between factors of production (Söderholm, 2000a), the responsiveness of electric utilities to fluctuations in the prices of other fuel inputs and factor inputs is important for energy suppliers as well as for policy authorities to improve energy efficiency and promote energy conservation. Further, considering that the majority of emissions (particularly carbon dioxide) are caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons, the ability to switch fuels in the electric power industry becomes a major target and tool for environmental policy makers. For instance, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 supports increasing coal as an energy resource in conjunction with reducing air pollution by clean coal initiatives.

This paper examines static and dynamic regional interfuel and interfactor substitution and measures technological change, production efficiency and total factor productivity in the eastern US electric power industry. In this study, electricity generation considers three fuel inputs (coal, oil and gas) and two factor inputs (capital and labor). A two-stage translog model is used to analyze annual data from seven regions in the eastern US. For interfuel elasticities, the empirical results show that all the own price elasticities in the static and dynamic models are negative except New York and Texas. Oil has the largest magnitude of own price elasticities while coal has the smallest. While complementarity exists between coal and oil (with the exceptions of New York and Texas), in both the static and dynamic models substitutability is shown between oil and gas, and between coal and gas (again with the exception of New York). However, it also has to be taken into consideration that coal is used in baseload generators that never shut down, gas used as a peak fuel is not designed to run continuously, and switching fuels is costly or impossible except between coal and oil.