Energy policies must be both durable and flexible in order to address economic, environmental, and geopolitical challenges and to ensure national competitiveness and security. The science of how to design durable policy, however, is underdeveloped, with expertise fragmented and often overly specialized. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences will conduct a workshop to explore how energy policies can be designed to better manage the introduction of new energy technologies. The workshop will pay particular attention to the question of how to design policies that are sustainable over several decades yet adaptable to new scientific and technological information.
Workshop participants will examine the conflict between the need to provide consistent signals to stakeholders and the need to make energy policy responsive to new information. They will discuss how to develop effective evaluation approaches and will produce a multidisciplinary agenda for future research. With representatives from academia, government, industry, and nongovernmental organizations, the workshop will develop a deeper understanding of how energy policies can encourage technological innovation and promote sustainable resource use.
Improving the U.S. energy system to meet today’s security and environmental challenges will require public policy that creates a market value for the desired environmental and security benefits. In addition, the policy framework must also be durable over multiple decades to accomplish the transition, yet flexible enough to adapt to new information as it becomes available. Despite many historical examples of efforts to incorporate both flexibility and durability into energy regulations, relatively little formal research exists on how to achieve this goal. This project was intended to help address this research gap by 1) developing a deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to durable yet adaptable energy policies; 2) establishing an agenda for future research on this topic; and 3) determining how to facilitate new interdisciplinary research collaborations. The principle activity was a workshop designed to identify important research questions that must be pursued to develop a more thorough understanding of how to design durable and adaptable energy and climate policy. Participants included leading political and legal scholars, current and former government and industry representatives, and scientists and engineers working at the intersection of science and policy. The conclusions from the workshop were published on the American Academy’s web site at www.amacad.org/content.aspx?i=1285. In the course of the workshop, a general consensus emerged that four design characteristics are necessary to promote both durability and adaptability. Participants agreed that successful policies and institutions will need to: Signal a clear commitment to resolving the climate problem that decisively shapes the long-range planning of affected parties, especially industry, but including producers and consumers; Incorporate a process for acquiring and acting on new information; Provide for a systematic evaluation of policy experience; and Produce outcomes that are valued by key constituencies. The workshop discussion strongly suggested that applying these design characteristics can enhance the likelihood that a given policy is durable yet flexible. In addition, it seems clear that many existing policies and institutions do not incorporate these characteristics. In particular, few policies and institutions embrace rigorous evaluations or mechanisms for learning from such evaluations. The workshop further concluded that while some important research on institutional and policy design for energy innovation and climate change exists, much remains to be done to understand fully how to develop durable yet flexible tools. By providing an opportunity for scholars from different disciplines to discuss the complicated issue of effective policy design, this project generated a research agenda to guide future cross-disciplinary explorations of this problem, including a systematic analysis of the essential design characteristics identified during the workshop.
