The impact of energy independence and security act of 2007 on renewable energy consumption in The United States

In recent years, global warming, climate change, increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, fluctuations in oil prices and countries' reliance on imported energy resources have increased the number of studies in the renewable energy field. Recognition of renewable energy sources as the main energy source coincided with the 1970s, and the number of studies carried out in this area is steadily increasing. In the literature, there are several studies in relation to the association between renewable energy consumption and economic growth. Differently, from other studies, the contribution of existing empirical study to the economic literature addresses the effectiveness of implemented sustainable energy policies. This study examines the impact of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA 2007) on renewable energy consumption in the US. The results obtained from this study are important for the countries that support renewable energy investments such as Turkey, India, China and aims to provide guidance for future studies. In this study, independent variables GDP, oil price and CO2 emissions which affect renewable energy consumption were introduced. Then our control variable which is EISA(2007) was explained. A set of time series consisting of total renewable energy consumption and CO2 emissions were chosen from the Energy Information Agency (EIA), and real GDP and oil prices were obtained from the Federal Reserve Economy Database (FRED). This dataset covers the first quarter of 1990 and the last quarter of 2017. First, to test the stability of these time series, ADF, PP, DF-GLS stationarity tests were employed and according to the obtained results it was understood that the series were stationary at their first differences. After the Johansen Cointegration test was performed, the model was estimated with Dynamic OLS and Fully Modified OLS estimators. According to the results obtained from both estimators, EISA (2007) positively and statistically significantly affects renewable energy consumption from 2008 to 2017 in the US.