Inside Climate News: “How Do Rooftop Solar and EVs Affect Electricity Costs for Everyone Else? Here’s a New Estimate”
Work by RFF Senior Fellow Joshua Linn and his colleagues at the University of Maryland is the subject of this piece.
“One of the most divisive topics among environmental advocates and researchers is the claim that the growth of rooftop solar leads to a concerning transfer of costs from households that have solar to those that don’t...
A recent working paper from economists at the University of Maryland offers a novel way of looking at this issue by examining how rooftop solar and electric vehicles affect electricity demand for the population as a whole, and how each contributes to changes in electricity costs for the public as a whole...
The paper was written by a team that includes Joshua Linn, who teaches economics at the University of Maryland and is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a think tank that studies energy and the environment... Linn and his coauthors found that adoption of rooftop solar has led to a 2.35 percent decrease in electricity utilities’ revenue, which the companies have partially recovered by increasing customer rates by 1.48 percent.”
