Adoption of electric stoves and rooftop solar can reduce fossil-fuel reliance and improve health by decreasing indoor air pollution and alleviating energy insecurity. This study assessed prevalence and perceptions of these clean-energy technologies to increase adoption in New York City (NYC). A representative survey of 1,950 NYC adults was conducted from February 28 to April 1, 2022. Fourteen percent of people had an electric stove; 86% had gas stoves. Black, Latino/a, and lower-income residents were more likely to have electric stoves than White and higher-income residents. Only 14% of residents were interested in switching from gas to electric stoves. Of the 71% with gas stoves uninterested in switching, nearly half (45%) preferred gas cooking, particularly among White and higher-income residents, indicating a large opportunity to shift preferences. About 5% used solar for their home or building; another 77% were interested in solar. Of the 18% uninterested in solar, reasons included lack of agency, confusion about operation, and costs. Education about health and cost benefits, induction technology, how to transition, available subsidies, and other efforts to reduce adoption barriers can support clean technology uptake. Residential clean energy metrics should be tracked regularly to ensure that technology adoption proceeds equitably.

The key policy priority for governments around the world during the 2020-2021 period was the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, this was swiftly replaced by an even graver urgent need to respond to Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022. This special issue aims to study the post-pandemic response and how related policy choices influence decarbonisation and energy transition efforts in the EU. While the special issue was initially conceived before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the question of policy responses to critical situations remains even more relevant in the face of Russia's attempt to redraft the political landscape of Europe by force. The dichotomy of existing views on whether the crisis caused by the pandemic is an opportunity or a threat to the energy transition is also present in the discussion and perception of the EU's energy and climate policy after the Russian invasion at least temporarily shifted energy security and decarbonisation priorities. Analysing energy and climate dimensions of the EU's post-pandemic recovery can provide policy implications applicable to the energy security crisis connected to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The number of crises experienced around the world forces people to reconsider and reassess various aspects of their lives. The energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine and uncontrolled climate change revealed the importance of energy-saving behavior. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyze the concerns about current crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate change's impact on energy-saving behavior and changes in environmental concern. Referring to the survey conducted in Lithuania in 2022, where 1000 respondents participated, the results revealed that the war in Ukraine was the most concerning problem. The level of climate change concern was slightly lower. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic was the least important problem in Lithuania in 2022. Furthermore, respondents stated that the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to the changes in environmental concern and energy-saving actions more than the war in Ukraine did. Meanwhile, the Generalized Linear Model results revealed that only the war in Ukraine positively and significantly influenced energy-saving behavior. The Covid-19 pandemic concern negatively affected energy-saving behavior, while the climate change concern factor affected it indirectly, as the interaction of attitudes toward energy consumption. Thus, this study revealed the main aspect of and how to encourage energy-saving behavior in the context of the main current crises.

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the study explores the hedging and safe-haven potential of green bonds for conventional equity, fixed income, commodity, and forex investments. We employ the cross-quantilogram approach to understand better the dynamic relationship between two assets under different market conditions. Our full sample results reveal that the green bond index could serve as a diversifier asset for medium- and long-term equity investors. Besides, it can serve as a hedging and safe-haven instrument for currency and commodity investments. Moreover, the sub-sample analysis of the pandemic period shows a heightened short- and medium-term lead-lag association between the green bond index and conventional investment returns. However, the green bond index emerges as a significant hedging and safe-haven asset for long-term investors of conventional financial assets. Our findings offer valuable insights for long-term investors when their portfolios are comprised of conventional assets such as equities, commodities, forex, and fixed income securities. Further, our findings reveal the potential role of green bond investments in global financial recovery efforts without compromising the low-carbon transition targets.

This paper estimates the impact of the COVID-19 on air travel demand and emissions in Brazil, the largest aviation market in Latin America. Combining detailed flight data and data on combustion emission factors, we estimate the CO emissions of domestic flights. A Bayesian structural time-series model was used to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on daily trends of air travel demand and emissions. The COVID-19 caused a reduction of 68% in national passengers and 63% in total CO emissions compared to what would have occurred if the pandemic had not happened. Despite such a sharp drop, fuel efficiency decreased after the COVID-19 outbreak, and passenger demand recovered to 64.2% of pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020. The fast recovery in domestic flights by December 2020 indicates that the emissions could soon return to pre-pandemic levels, demonstrating the challenges of reducing emissions in the aviation sector in the short term.

COVID-19 pandemic has affected clean energy labor market. Using real-time job vacancy data, this study analyzes the impacts of the pandemic on the U.S. clean energy labor market in 2020, including biomass, energy efficiency (EE), electric vehicle (EV), power/microgrid, solar, and wind industries. This study identifies how COVID-health factors and public health interventions influence clean energy job availability during the early COVID pandemic. Overall, California had the most energy jobs and experienced a significant decrease in April 2020. EV and solar had the highest percentages of job vacancies during the pandemic in general. Still, lockdowns had the most severe influence on EE and wind jobs. Stay-at-home orders negatively affected clean energy job vacancies in biomass, EV, power/microgrid, and wind. Social-gathering restrictions, however, did not have much influence. Increased COVID tests at the state level had the strongest and most positive influence on clean energy job postings, indicating the importance of a state's ability to manage public health infrastructure or crisis issues. COVID hospitalizations negatively influenced the job vacancies in biomass and wind but did not affect the other four sectors; conversely, as COVID death numbers increased, the number of jobs in biomass, EV, power grid, solar, and wind decreased, but not in EE jobs.

This study evaluates the effect of complete nationwide lockdown in 2020 on residential electricity demand across 13 Indian cities and the role of digitalisation using a public smart meter dataset. We undertake a data-driven approach to explore the energy impacts of work-from-home norms across five dwelling typologies. Our methodology includes climate correction, dimensionality reduction and machine learning-based clustering using Gaussian Mixture Models of daily load curves. Results show that during the lockdown, maximum daily peak demand increased by 150-200% as compared to 2018 and 2019 levels for one room-units (RM1), one bedroom-units (BR1) and two bedroom-units (BR2) which are typical for low- and middle-income families. While the upper-middle- and higher-income dwelling units (i.e., three (3BR) and more-than-three bedroom-units (M3BR)) saw night-time demand rise by almost 44% in 2020, as compared to 2018 and 2019 levels. Our results also showed that new peak demand emerged for the lockdown period for RM1, BR1 and BR2 dwelling typologies. We found that the lack of supporting socioeconomic and climatic data can restrict a comprehensive analysis of demand shocks using similar public datasets, which informed policy implications for India's digitalisation. We further emphasised improving the data quality and reliability for effective data-centric policymaking.

The COVID-19 pandemic is manifesting its devastating effects in multiple directions, even indirectly affecting the health of citizens, for instance, by increasing the level of energy poverty (EP). As part of the studies that are trying to frame the consequences of the pandemic, this paper aims to identify the effects on EP in the coming years in a bid to identify the countries of the European Union most affected and the time span necessary to return to a path to reduce EP. For this purpose, an analysis based on the supervised learning algorithms of dynamic factor models is carried out. The outcomes of this investigation show that the negative effects of the pandemic on the level of EP will be reabsorbed very slowly, not before 2025, and in any case with substantial differences between countries, further widening the gap between countries with low levels of EP and those with greater EP levels.

This study explores different energy consumption vectors during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Portugal. Most of the workforce started working from home and resource consumption significantly shifted towards the domestic sector. The ensuing confinement protocols caused a shift in everyday life, which in turn significantly altered the energy supply and demand landscape. This event, although catastrophic in terms of loss of human life and economic development, can provide us with valuable data to study the potential of new strategies to achieve EU 2050 Energy goals. It was investigated whether the pandemic has opened a path and provided us with a partial answer to decarbonization in the form of home office practices as a possible energy efficiency measure. The present study shows that, in Portugal, there was a 15.7% reduction of primary energy consumption (accounting for electricity, natural gas and transport fuels) compared to 2019. The data suggest that actions targeting reduced mobility, such as home office practices and the decentralization of the workforce, could be a relevant energy efficiency measure.

Assessments of the impact of the U.S. renewable fuel standard (RFS) should inform consideration of future biofuels policy. Conventional wisdom suggests the RFS played a major role in stimulating the ten-fold expansion in ethanol production and consumption in the United States from 2002 to 2019, but evidence increasingly suggests the RFS might have had a smaller effect than previously assumed. Price competitiveness, federal and state policies such as reformulated gasoline requirements, and octane content in ethanol also affect ethanol market attractiveness. This study explores the roles of policy and economic factors by comparing historical data with results from scenarios simulated in a system dynamics model. Results suggest price competitiveness explains much of the growth in the ethanol industry from 2002 to 2019. The Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit and phaseout of the oxygenate methyl tert-butyl ether contributed to earlier growth relative to expected timing of growth based on fuel price alone. The RFS (modeled through observed Renewable Identification Numbers [RINs]) contributed to increased ethanol production in later years and may have increased production in the earlier years if risk of investment was decreased.

The effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on ambient air pollution levels in urban south-central Chile, where outdoor air pollution primarily originates indoors from wood burning for heating, may differ from trends in cities where transportation and industrial emission sources dominate. This quasi-experimental study compared hourly fine (PM) and coarse (PM) particulate matter measurements from six air monitors (three beta attenuation monitors; three low-cost sensors) in commercial and low/middle-income residential areas of Temuco, Chile between 2019 and 2020. The potential impact of varying annual meterological conditions on air quality was also assessed. During COVID-19 lockdown, average monthly ambient PM concentrations in a commercial and middle-income residential neighborhood of Temuco were up to 50% higher (from 12 to 18 μg/m) and 59% higher (from 22 to 35 μg/m) than 2019 levels, respectively. Conversely, PM levels decreased by up to 52% (from 43 to 21 μg/m) in low-income areas. The fine fraction of PM in April 2020 was 48% higher than in April 2017-2019 (from 50% to 74%) in a commercial area. These changes did not appear to result from meterological differences between years. During COVID-19 lockdown, higher outdoor PM pollution from wood heating existed in more affluent areas of Temuco, while PM concentrations declined among poorer households refraining from wood heating. To reduce air pollution and energy poverty in south-central Chile, affordability of clean heating fuels (e.g. electricity) should be a policy priority.

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has increased the production costs of renewable energy facilities and undermines the profitability of renewable energy investment. Green finance polices, e.g. carbon pricing, tradable green certificate (TGC) and green credit, can provide low-cost finances and counteract the adverse effects of COVID-19 pandemic. In this work, the generation costs of offshore wind power before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in China are analyzed using the data of 97 offshore wind power projects implemented in the period of 2014-2020, and the effect of green finance policy on the generation cost and the project profitability are evaluated. The results show that the average levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of offshore wind power decreased from 0.86 CNY/kWh in 2014 to 0.72 CNY/kWh in 2019, while it increased to 0.79 CNY/kWh in 2020, i.e. 10.85% increase relative to that in 2019. With the average carbon price of 50 CNY/t CO, the average TGC price of 170 CNY and the green-credit policy being introduced, the average LCOE decreases to 0.76 CNY/kWh, 0.67 CNY/kWh and 0.74 CNY/kWh respectively. The green finance policy mix is still necessary to support the offshore wind power investment during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sustainable living has emerged as the need of the hour for mankind in present times. Practitioners, as well as scholarship in the area, are divided over the comparison of financial returns from sustainable indexes vis-à-vis conventional indexes, causing investors' dilemma. These questions loom larger during the times of global crises, such as COVID-19, which have brought sustainability concerns to the limelight. This dilemma of the investors leads us to approach the study on hand. We study the Thomson Reuters/S-Network global indexes (as a proxy for sustainability-based indexes), and their corresponding alternatives, using the daily closing prices from 1 January 2011 to 29 June 2020. We apply the time-frequency-based Granger-Causality test, and further attempt to understand the coherence between these indexes before and during the COVID-19 period by using the Wavelet Coherence and phase-difference mechanisms. Our results suggest short-run uni-directional causality from sustainable indexes to conventional indexes whereas bi-directional causality in medium and the long-runs. The coherence is particularly stronger at low frequencies, indicating the long-run coherence with sustainable indexes in the lead during COVID-19. The results and conclusions of the study have important implications for different audiences. The portfolio and fund managers can prefer to invest in such markets to avail of higher returns over a longer period.

Fuel subsidies in Nigeria are enormous - around USD 3.9 billion - almost double the health budget. Such subsidies come at great cost: the opportunity costs of such spending on other development objectives are large; the distribution of resources to the state governments is reduced; the vast majority of the subsidy goes to better off Nigerians; and cheaper petrol encourages greater pollution, congestion and climate change. Despite this, most Nigerians oppose the reduction of subsidies. We draw on a new nationally representative household survey that asked Nigerian men and women about their knowledge and attitudes towards subsidies. We construct and test a set of hypotheses about the factors associated with support for subsidy reform. We find that those who pay more or who experience less availability of fuel tend to support reform more. On the other hand, people who believe the Government is corrupt or lacks the capacity to implement compensation programs appear strongly opposed to reform. Finally, being religious and the delivery of reasonable national and local services also improves the acceptance of reform. These results support the idea that building a social contract is key to reform success.

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has led to a massive collapse in economic activity and energy demand, with the result of significant emissions reductions at a global scale. However, the existing literature investigating abatement from COVID-19 mainly overlooked the overwhelming emissions reduction in Europe's power sector. We address this by assessing the intricate relationship between electricity demand shocks and heterogeneous generation technologies in the power sectors of 16 major European economies during January to March 2020. We apply an econometric model in an instrumental-variables framework. In a first step, we assess the impact of COVID-19 infections on electricity demand, and in a second step how this translates into emissions abatement. We find that, during full lockdown, COVID-19 reduced electricity demand by 19% and carbon emissions by an astonishing 34% per hour, whereas there is severe country heterogeneity depending on the electricity supply structure and demand shock intensity. From our estimates, we predict that power sector emissions fell by 18.4% in 2020. Our results reveal the importance of a carbon price, so that a demand reduction can offset large amounts of emissions by displacing coal at the margin. We derive several policy implications from our analysis to draw lessons from the pandemic.

I investigate how the Covid-19 epidemic affected consumption and prices in a part of the Nordic electricity market that has a high penetration of intermittent renewable energy: Denmark and the southernmost part of Sweden. In sharp contrast to studies of other regions, I find no overall drop in consumption in this region. However, the distribution of consumption shifted away from peak hours. Nonetheless, prices dropped significantly, with a decline that started well before the imposition of societal restrictions in Denmark. Periods where wind power covered all of local load saw prices collapse towards zero with little variance under the Covid-19 epidemic. The results have important policy implications. Energy-only markets may fail to provide sufficient investment incentives for renewable energy when penetrations of such generation are already high. Policies and technologies that shift load from peak to non-peak times may further erode market incentives.

As a market for sustainability investing is growing rapidly, understanding the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities on firms' financial performance is becoming increasingly important. In this study, we examine the effect of ESG performance on stock returns and volatility during the financial crisis resulting from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. To quantify the impact, we use company-level daily ESG score data and United Nations Global Compact (GC) score data. In our dataset, ESG scores indicate ESG performance that is deemed important to financial materiality, and the GC score indicates the firm reputation for following UN rules. Our results indicate that during the pandemic, an increase in the ESG score, especially the E score component, is related to higher returns and lower volatility. Conversely, increasing GC scores is correlated with lower stock returns and higher volatility. In addition, we find that firms in lower return groups benefit more than other firms. Focusing on energy sector impacts, we show that although the non-energy sector benefits more than the energy sector from increasing E scores, energy sector firms can still reduce their stock price volatility by increasing these scores. Our study offers significant implications for ESG investment strategies during financial crises.

Being declared a global emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken many lives, threatened livelihoods and businesses around the world. The energy industry, in particular, has experienced tremendous pressure resulting from the pandemic. In response to such a challenge, the development of sustainable resources and renewable energy infrastructure has demonstrated its potential as a promising and effective strategy. To sufficiently address the effect of COVID-19 on renewable energy development strategies, short-term policy priorities should be identified, while mid-term and long-term action plans should be formulated in achieving the well-defined renewable energy targets and progress towards a more sustainable energy future. In this review, opportunities, challenges, and significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on current and future sustainable energy strategies were analyzed in detail; while drawing from experiences in identifying reasonable behaviors, orientating appropriate actions, and policy implications on the sustainable energy trajectory were also mentioned. Indeed, the question is that whether the COVID-19 pandemic will kill us or provide us with a precious lesson on future sustainable energy development.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered serious economic crises in many countries. In Spain, millions of individuals have been ordered to remain at home and many are unemployed. The increased use of electrical appliances and low incomes make energy poverty highly likely. This study thus analyses the effectiveness of unemployment benefits and social measures to help Spanish family units pay their electricity bill during the COVID-19-induced lockdown in Spain (March-May 2020) and during a hypothetical lockdown in winter and summer. The results showed that the unemployment aids can contribute to alleviating energy poverty, especially if the unemployed individual worked in a poorly-paying job or for just a few hours. However, the social measures were found insufficient to avoid energy poverty. The application of a variable discount percentage in the electricity bill based on income and the month of the year would reduce energy poverty risk during further incidences of lockdown.

Electricity demand and its typical load pattern are usually affected by many endogenous and exogenous factors to which the generation system must accordingly respond through utility operators. Lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 imposed by many countries have led to sudden changes in socioeconomic habits which have had direct effects on the electricity systems. Therefore, a detailed analysis of how confinement measures have modified the electricity consumption in Spain, one of the countries most affected by this pandemic, has been performed in this work. Its electricity consumption has decreased by 13.49% from March 14 to April 30, compared to the average value of five previous years. Daily power demand profiles, especially morning and evening peaks, have been modified at homes, hospitals, and in the total power demand. These changes generate a greater uncertainty for the System Operator when making demand forecasts, but production deviations have increased by only 0.1%, thanks to the presence of a diversified generation mix, which has been modified during this period, increasing the proportion of renewable sources and decreasing CO emissions.

Energy is a key component for economic growth as well as for human development. India is the third-ranking electricity generator in the world but ranks 106th in terms of per capita consumption. Specifically, the distribution of power is the most important link in the value chain of the power sector since it is the cash register for the entire sector. In India, electricity is a concurrent subject shared between the Central and State Governments. While the generation of power has been deregulated since 2003, the supply of power to the consumers is generally carried out by Government-owned power Distribution Companies (DISCOMs). In this paper, the authors analyze the financial distress of DISCOMs in India, and explain how the supply-demand mismatch due to over-ambitious demand projections, the fixed and energy charges of thermal power plants, and the excess procurement of "must-run" renewable sources together contribute to the high cost of power procurement that drives the financial stress faced by DISCOMs. The authors support their assertion with a study of nine DISCOMs supplying electricity to 155 million people in three States and propose policy recommendations for a turnaround of such DISCOMs which can be rolled out with suitable modifications across India.