About

Kevin Novan is an Associate Professor specializing in Energy and Environmental Economics at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Davis. His research focuses on issues related to energy markets, environmental economics, and resource and environmental policies. Novan's work involves research design for applied microeconomics, economic analysis of resource and environmental policies, and microeconomic theory, contributing to the understanding of how economic principles can be applied to address environmental challenges and energy-related issues.

Research topics

• Economics
• Natural resource economics
• Environmental science
• Engineering
• Environmental economics
• Microeconomics
• Waste management
• Accounting

Selected publications

• Cost-Effectiveness of Urban Water Demand Management Programs

  Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management · 2024-12-06 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  During droughts, potable water agencies may need to increase supply or reduce demand. Water agencies have many options for water demand management (WDM), including low flow toilets, showerheads, faucet aerators, educational outreach, and more. Reduced water consumption may result in energy savings, both at the customer and utility level. In this study, we estimated household water, electricity, and natural gas and utility-wide energy savings using statistical modeling for four large water demand management programs implemented between 2014 and 2018 in California. These programs focused on single and multifamily retrofit programs. These retrospective analyses were performed using household-level data gathered from multiple water, electricity, and natural gas companies. We found detectable water savings in three of the four programs, no detectable electricity savings for any program, and detectable gas savings in only one program. The deemed estimates of water savings were generally inaccurate predictors of actual savings. All programs that reduced household water consumption also reduced system-wide electricity consumption. A benefit–cost analysis was performed for each program from the perspectives of three stakeholders: water utilities, households, and a regulatory authority responsible for greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Many of the program actions were not cost-effective for the participating utilities and households because of the low cost of water. For the WDM programs considered here cost-effective from the perspective of the water utilities, the opportunity cost of consuming an additional unit of water would have to exceed their observed variable production costs in 2020 by a factor of 3 to nearly 20, dependent on the utility. In settings with sufficiently severe drought conditions and impending water scarcity, it is certainly plausible to expect that the opportunity cost of water consumption could reach such levels. WDM is an effective method of reducing GHG emissions for programs that target hot water savings, and the cost of these programs was consistent with non–water-related programs that target GHG emission reductions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding the Inequality and Welfare Impacts of Carbon Tax Policies

  Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Working Paper Series · 2024-05-02 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper develops a general equilibrium lifecycle model to explore the welfare and inequality implications of different ways to return carbon tax revenue back to households. We find that the welfare maximizing rebate uses two thirds of carbon-tax revenue to reduce the distortionary tax on capital income while using the remaining one third to increase the progressivity of the labor-income tax. This recycling approach attains higher welfare and more equality than the lump-sum rebate approach preferred by policymakers as well as the approach originally prescribed by economists __ which called exclusively for reductions in distortionary taxes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do time-of-use prices deliver energy savings at the right time?

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2024-09-17 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Time-of-use (TOU) electricity prices are increasingly being adopted to reduce consumption during the higher marginal cost afternoon hours. There is ample evidence that TOU rates reduce average consumption during the peak price hours of the day, but it is unknown how these energy savings are distributed across days. Using a unique dataset from households with smart thermostats, we find that adopting TOU rates causes large decreases in peak period AC usage, resulting in energy savings that are concentrated on the hottest, highest demand days when the benefits of conservation are the greatest.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding the Inequality and Welfare Impacts of Carbon Tax Policies

  Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · 2024-10-31 · 12 citations

  article

  This study develops a general equilibrium life-cycle model to explore the welfare and inequality implications of different ways to return carbon tax revenue back to households. We find that the welfare-maximizing rebate uses two-thirds of carbon-tax revenue to reduce the distortionary tax on capital income while using the remaining one-third to increase the progressivity of the labor income tax. This recycling approach attains higher welfare and more equality than the lump-sum rebate approach preferred by policymakers as well as the approach originally prescribed by economists—which called exclusively for reductions in distortionary taxes.

  PublisherDOI

• Estimates of the marginal curtailment rates for solar and wind generation

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2024-01-13 · 16 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hourly accounting of carbon emissions from electricity consumption

  Environmental Research Letters · 2022 · 77 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Accounting
  • Natural resource economics

  Abstract Carbon accounting is important for quantifying the sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are driving climate change, and is increasingly being used to guide policy, investment, business, and regulatory decisions. The current practice for accounting emissions from consumed electricity, guided by standards like the GHG protocol, uses annual-average grid emission factors, although previous studies have shown that grid carbon intensity varies across seasons and hours of the day. Previous case studies have shown that annual-average carbon accounting can bias emission inventories, but none have shown that this bias is substantial or widespread. This study addresses this gap by calculating emission inventories for thousands of residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural facilities across the US, and explores the magnitude and direction of this bias compared to hourly accounting of emissions. Our results show that annual-average accounting can over- or under-estimate carbon inventories as much as 35% in certain settings but result in effectively no bias in others. Bias will be greater in regions with high variation in carbon intensity, and for end-users with high variation in their electricity consumption across hours and seasons. As variation in carbon intensity continues to grow with growing shares of variable and intermittent renewable generation, these biases will only continue to worsen in the future. In most cases, using monthly-average emission factors does not substantially reduce bias compared to annual averages. Thus, the authors recommend that hourly accounting be adopted as the best practice for emissions inventories of consumed electricity.

  PublisherDOI

• Climate policy transition risk and the macroeconomy

  European Economic Review · 2022-06-11 · 57 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Uncertainty and additionality in energy efficiency programs

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2022-06-27 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Climate Policy Transition Risk and the Macroeconomy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Emissions, Transmission, and the Environmental Value of Renewable Energy

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2021 · 75 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Natural resource economics
  • Economics
  • Environmental science

  We examine how transmission congestion alters the environmental benefits provided by renewable generation. Using hourly data from the Texas and midcontinent electricity markets, we find that relaxing transmission constraints between the wind-rich areas and the demand centers of the respective markets conservatively increases the nonmarket value of wind by 30 percent for Texas and 17 percent for midcontinent markets. Much of this increase in the nonmarket value arises from a redistribution in where air quality improvements occur—when transmission is not constrained, wind offsets much more pollution from fossil fuel units located near highly populated demand centers. (JEL L94, Q42, Q51, Q53)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• William B. Peterman

  Federal Reserve Board of Governors

  28 shared

• Stephie Fried

  Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

  25 shared

• Aaron Smith

  20 shared

• Tianxia Zhou

  University of California, Davis

  18 shared

• Jacob LaRiviere

  Microsoft (United States)

  7 shared

• Ben Gilbert

  3 shared

• James Bushnell

  3 shared

• Frank Asche

  University of Stavanger

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, San Diego

  2012

• B.A., Economics & Mathematics

  Western Washington University

  2005