For one week following each TAP Webinar, which is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy Technical Assistance Project (TAP) for state and local officials, you are invited to ask questions of the presenters, enter comments about the topic of the presentation, and share your thoughts with others. You can find copies of presentations from the November 18 Webinar in PDF format and audio files in MP3 format and background materials and reports in the TAP Webinar archive.

Question:
How will you be able to account for the more qualitative contextual factors within the states in future policy evaluation analyses?

Some of these contextual factors will be easier to quantify than others. For instance, we have fairly good resource information, so we can categorize the availability of different resources in each state or region as excellent, good, fair, or poor and assign it a numerical value. We can also account for the economic context of a state, to account for differences in electricity prices and gross state product, for instance. Land use consideration can be accounted for by quantifying the acreage where a technology could be feasibly developed.

Factors such as institutional structures, which are looking at the degree of coordination within the industry or different government offices, will be more difficult to account for in the quantitatively. They will have to be considered as a supplement to the statistical analysis.