Economics research and partnerships

EDF partners with academic institutions around the world, ensuring that we are part of the latest research in environmental economics.

Electricity tariffs

Our economists are partnering with the MIT Energy Initiative, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law, and Commonwealth Edison to study how different types of electricity tariffs can affect environmental and economic outcomes, through the incentives it provides to electric customers to conserve energy and invest in distributed energy technologies such as solar energy, batteries, and energy efficiency. This project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, began in summer 2017 and will last for two years.

EDF is leading the project and is bringing expertise in energy economics, while MIT is contributing the modeling framework and capabilities. NYU is supporting the work with regulatory and economics expertise, and Commonwealth Edison, a local electric utility in Illinois, is supplying customer usage data and will help develop the tariffs to be tested with MIT’s model.

Climate Econometrics

EDF is working with the University of Oxford to understand the interaction of human activity and climate change through empirical modelling of energy balance systems. The partnership aims to:

• Improve understanding of the human impacts on climate and vice versa
• Explore how econometrics can be used in climate-economic research, and
• Bring together researchers in the field of Climate Econometrics through an international network, and disseminate the results to decision makers