Americans will pay for clean energy

Americans agree the United States needs a national clean energy standard and are willing to pay more to make it happen, a survey indicates. Researchers from Yale and Harvard universities, writing in Nature Climate Change, say on average U.S. citizens are willing to pay $162 more per year in electricity bills to support a standard requiring 80 percent of their energy be "clean," not derived from fossil fuels. The study results suggest the Obama Administration's proposal for a national standard to require 80 percent clean energy by 2035 could pass both chambers of Congress if it increased average electricity rates by no more than 5 percent, the researchers said. "Our aim in this research was to investigate how politically feasible an NCES [national clean energy standard] really is from both an economics and political science perspective," Yale professor of environmental economics and policy Matthew Kotchen said in a Yale release Monday. The researchers estimate Senate passage of such a standard would require an average household cost increase of $59 per year while House passage would require costs of $48 per year. The study surveyed a nationally representative survey of 1,010 U.S. citizens April 23 through May 12.