Wasting Energy: Waste-to-Energy’s Struggle Highlights America’s Failure to Incentivize Renewable Energy

Abstract

This paper argues that waste-to-energy’s stagnation in the U.S. illustrates the failure of state-based renewable energy portfolio standards to efficiently incentivize the growth of renewable energy. The absence of a federal renewable energy standard and resultant patchwork of state-based regimes has left the country with no consistent definition of “renewable energy.�? Consequently, developers of certain energy technologies are uncertain as to whether their product will qualify as “renewable,�? and thus are unable to confidently invest the millions of dollars needed to deploy these technologies. Using waste-to-energy as a case study, this paper argues that a national renewable portfolio standard, defining “renewable energy�? consistently and inclusively, would help to create a maximally efficient renewable energy market.