Assessing potential for policy feedback from renewable energy incentive programs

Climate advocates look optimistically to policy feedback as a mechanism for locking-in a decarbonization policy trajectory, but little research has examined whether and how climate legislation creates constituencies that could provide future political support. This article focuses on incentive programs supporting investment in solar PV and the potential for policy feedback through participating households. We first develop a framework of feedback potential that considers the volume and partisanship of incentive program beneficiaries and their distribution across electoral districts. We then apply the framework to New York State's solar PV incentive program, which enabled over 140,000 households to install solar PV. We find that the number of solar PV incentive beneficiaries is positively associated with Republican vote share, suggesting potential for a strong pro-solar constituency in the pivotal, Republican-led districts. Within electoral districts, however, beneficiaries skew Democratic, raising questions about the direction of policy feedback. The results carry implications for the kind of politics that incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act may set in motion in the coming years.

Fedor A. Dokshin