UC Berkeley

Policies and programs to encourage energy efficiency in buildings have been prevalent since the 1970s. In more recent years, concerns about global climate change have motivated increased effort toward promoting energy efficiency as well as distributed renewable energy – largely solar photovoltaics – sited on buildings. This dissertation builds on the evidence base that seeks to understand the impact of policy instruments promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy in residential buildings. Each chapter evaluates some aspect of policy or program performance in an ex post fashion, leveraging observed outcomes related to the policy instruments at issue. The first chapter explores the impact of residential building energy codes on state-level energy consumption, exploiting variation in the timing of code adoption from state to state. I find that more stringent building energy codes have led to reduced energy consumption in the residential sector. The second chapter considers the impact of alternative financing program designs – with repayment occurring on or off the utility bill – on the repayment performance of customers who take out otherwise similar loans from a program in New York State to support energy efficiency measures. Contrary to expectations, I show that on-bill loans become delinquent more often than otherwise similar off-bill loans – though this finding is likely explained by the particular structure of payment priority in this program and may not generalize to other on-bill loans. The third chapter considers whether the availability of another financing program – residential property assessed clean energy, or R-PACE – led to greater deployment of residential solar PV systems in California. I demonstrate that cities and counties that adopted R-PACE programs deployed more residential PV systems than otherwise similar jurisdictions that did not adopt these programs.