Bolstering Public Support for State-Level Renewable Energy Policies

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Since the 1980s, the United States has often been a world leader in supporting renewable energy technologies at the state and federal level. Thirty-seven states have enacted binding or voluntary renewable portfolio standards (RPS) requiring that a portion of the electricity mix come from renewable sources by a given date. But since 2011, adoption of such standards has slowed, and in the past several years there have been many attempts — some of them successful — to weaken, freeze, or repeal renewable energy laws.

Given the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, increased federal investment in renewable energy is unlikely for the foreseeable future. As a result, state-level renewable energy policies will likely be central to driving new deployment. Past research has shown that public opinion plays a crucial role in facilitating a political consensus around new policies in U.S. states. If that’s true for renewable energy policies, then people’s views may have a major influence on future actions taken by their states.

For the past three years, MIT Associate Professor Christopher Warshaw of the Department of Political Science and Leah Stokes SM ’15, PhD ’15, now an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara, have been examining the interaction between public opinion and renewable energy policymaking. First, is there evidence that public opinion and energy policy align within a particular state? And second, what determines that public opinion? For example, can the design of a given RPS policy or how it’s presented to the public — that is, how it’s portrayed or framed — increase or decrease support for the policy?

Now, an analysis by Warshaw and Stokes finds that state legislators are, in fact, broadly responsive to public opinion in this policy arena. And based on data from a public opinion survey, the researchers offer practical advice on how to bolster public support for renewable policies. Their findings are published today in the journal Nature Energy.

Public opinion and renewable energy policy, state by state

To begin investigating their questions, Warshaw and Stokes turned to data gathered by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a major survey supported by 56 universities, including MIT, that has its origins in a survey first funded by the MIT Energy Initiative a decade ago. In the 2014 cooperative survey, 56,200 people were asked whether they supported an RPS policy that “requires the use of a minimum amount of renewable fuels (wind, solar, and hydroelectric) in the generation of electricity, even if electricity prices increase a little.”

Using the 2014 survey data, Warshaw and Stokes explored the relationship between public opinion and policy on a state-by-state basis. Their analysis showed that in most states a majority of the public supports renewable energy requirements — although frequently by a narrow margin. In addition, public support within each state is strongly correlated with the RPS policy now in effect. Thirty-seven states plus the District of Columbia have RPS policies that are congruent with the views of a majority of their citizens, leaving only 13 that don’t. All 13 states where more than 60 percent of the public supports an RPS have a binding RPS policy, with varying levels of ambitiousness. As public support drops close to or below 50 percent, states are much less likely to have a binding RPS.

“Overall, these findings suggest that state legislators are broadly responsive to public opinion on this issue,” says Warshaw. “If public support for renewable energy policies increased, we could expect to see more renewable energy laws.”

A new experiment

In other areas of policymaking, research has shown that exactly how a policy is designed and presented can significantly impact whether the public supports or opposes it. Thus, it’s possible that certain details of RPS policies could be swaying public opinion. “We needed to gauge how the design and framing of renewable energy policies may affect people’s support for them across the states,” says Warshaw. He and Stokes set out to design a survey experiment that would give them insight into what drives people’s opinions of renewable energy policies.

They knew many factors could influence support for an RPS policy — from possible changes in electric bills to impacts on employment opportunities. A simple survey experiment might involve randomizing one such attribute at a time. For example, one group could be told that the new policy will increase residential electric bills, and the group’s response could then be compared to that of a control group that receives no information about added costs.

But the attributes of interest here are independent — they have no impact on one another — so the researchers could investigate all of them simultaneously. With this approach, the effects of the different attributes are all measured on the same scale. When the results are in, it’s easy to see which factors are most important and warrant special attention or concern.

In the new survey, all recipients received a central statement posing the possibility of the recipient’s state adopting a new RPS bill requiring that the state meet 35 percent of its electricity needs with renewable energy sources by the year 2025. Along with that description, they received a variety of additional statements about specific attributes of the bill, randomly distributed among the survey recipients. For each attribute, some (randomly selected) people received no added information, thereby serving as the control group in the experiment.

Warshaw and Stokes received replies from about 2,500 respondents. They then performed a statistical analysis on all the data to determine how much information on each of the attributes changed people’s views of the basic RPS policy from those of the control group.

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