Colloquium: Prof. Dr. Sonia Yeh
Wednesday, May 4, 2022, at 12.30 - 13.30
RZ F 21 or Online, Zoom | Sign up here
This talk is carried out in cooperation with the CSFM.
Tradable performance standards (TPS) – insights from real-world applications in the transportation sector.
Performance standards have a long history in environmental policy. A performance standard sets a standard of technology performance but leaves technology choice to producers; it increases the relative costs of technologies with undesirable performance characteristics and lowers the costs of technologies with desirable characteristics. In the past decade, trading has been incorporated (thus termed as tradable performance standard, TPS) into several U.S. transportation programs: regulations for greenhouse gas emissions from passenger cars and trucks (national), zero-emission vehicle programs (10 states), the Renewable Fuel Standard (national), and low-carbon fuel standards (two states). We show that sectoral TPS programs have high credit prices but low price effects on products and provide strong incentives for upstream innovation and technology transformation. Given that the expected carbon price may be too low to substantially affect transportation demand or technology change, combining TPS with a carbon price may be necessary to drive innovation and achieve a sustained low-carbon transformation in the sector.
About Prof. Dr. Sonia Yeh
Dr. Sonia Yeh is Professor in Transport and Energy Systems in the Department of Space, Earth and Environment. Her expertise is in energy economics and energy system modeling, alternative transportation fuels, sustainability standards, technological change, and consumer behavior and mobility. Throughout her work, she has advised and worked broadly with U.S. state and international advisers, policymakers, a wide range of stakeholder groups and academic researchers in developing climate policies toward reducing the environmental impacts and GHG emissions from transport. She served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair Professor in Alternative Energy Technology in 2016-2017 and received Håkan Frisinger Award by Volvo Research and Educational Foundations in 2019. She is an adjunct professor at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University and a Senior Editor for Energy Policy journal since 2018.
Dr. Yeh has worked extensively with international researchers, stakeholder groups, and governance bodies and regularly advises, collaborates and provides inputs to international organisations including the International Energy Agency (IEA), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (UNFCCC COP)(working with national and local governments developing tools to develop transport strategies for the Nationally Determined Contributions NDCs), International Transport Forum-OECD, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, etc. Dr. Yeh funded and co-leads the International Transportation Energy Modeling (ITEM) project https://transportenergy.org, participated by academic institutions, international and national energy agencies, major oil companies, and NGOs coordinating research on future scenarios, big data and research needs on EVs, MaaS, and policy needs to promote low carbon transitions in transport. She is a contributing author of Transport chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report.
The presentation of the talk is available for protected page download.