Article Essay on Energy Policy
This article had a lot to say about the adoption of renewable portfolio standards (RPS). The article written by Ming-Yuan Huang, Janake R.R. Alavalapatie, Douglas R. Carter, and Matthew H. Langholts, was published in the November 2007 issue volume 35 of Energy Policy. They did a study on why some states in the U.S. have adopted or intend to adopt RPS and others have not. Before they go into what the study states the authors start out by helping the reader understand the thing it will be analyzing. The bias is detected by the way they describe the RPS, and how wonderful it is. It sets up the hypothesis well by inserting their thinking and how they see the issue.
They decided to look at six different factors and come up with an equation to see the states likelihood of adopting RPS. Their hypothesis was as stated, “We hypothesize that socio-economic, political and environmental factors influence state’s choice to either adopt or not adopt RPS.”(Ming) The hypothesis that they used was general, but they wanted to know why some agreed to RPS and others did not. They wanted to take a look at it in the scientific community. To support to support the hypothesis they used a binary method and a logistic function that approximates the normal distribution. The binary limits them to having a 1 or 0 which they assigned “a value of 0 if a state did not adopt and 1 otherwise” (Ming). Not only were equations used but they added in the article descriptive statistics for variables used in the analysis, they added in the use of correlation, regression, elasticity at means, P-values and Chi square values. The study did not include confidence intervals it was not that specific. Tables were displayed to show them and they inserted one graph that depicted the percentage of renewable energy and the target year for selected standard in the U.S. It compares the states that already have RPS and at what percent they set it at or intend to reach.
The P-values for variables, Education, Political Party Dominance, and Constant were set at a 95% confidence level with significance set at the 5% level; meaning that they are willing to be wrong within 5%. When the study dealt with variables, Natural Resource Expenditures, Gross Rate of Production, and Gross State Product, they raised that level of significance to .10 or to 10%. They showed the elasticity values in percentages. The continuous variables did well with these comparisons since they are elastic unlike the “dummy variable” that does not apply. Some of the variables were hard to define because of too much variance, like in the case of the Political Party Dominance, because each person is different and humans lie. So the study had to state that they configured it with all “other variables fixed”. It was a theoretical arrangement. A few of the relationships did even not come out as they expected and they gave proper explanation of each of them. So the hypothesis was not correct. However, there were parts that did support the claim but the authors did state that they would need to do further research to conclude better results. The most positive part in the conclusion was the encouragement to go out and be productive. Overall they kept the reader engaged on a personal level showing human interest in a movement.
The article was not entirely easy for me to read. It was not overtly long but dealt with a lot of statistics in depth. It was nice to see vocabulary dealing with statistics in an article about statistics and being able to understand it. Although, I did have to re-read it 3 times to get the general overview of the article and not get lost in the linguistics. The research done was pretty deep. There was a citation of seventeen different sources. They were a combination of scholarly journals and information from the government and environmental energy companies.
Works Cited
Ming-Yuan Huang, Janaki R.R. Alavalapati, douglas R. Carter and Matthew H. Langholtz. Energy Policy. Vol. 35 Issue 11, Nov. 2007. Science Direct. School of Forest Resources and Conservation University of Florida. 25 March 2008.
