In March, subsidy research organisation Earth Track released a new report, EIA Energy Subsidy Estimates: A review of assumptions and omissions, which analyses why the United States' Energy Information Administration (EIA) underestimates the true cost of federal energy subsidies.

It makes a number of conclusions and recommendations, including the following:

• The EIA reports on federal energy subsidies are not conducted with enough regularity or systematic consistency. This can result in arbitrary or inconsistent application of what qualifies as a subsidy, and different methods being used to estimate subsidies in different studies, making data insufficiently comprehensive and difficult to compare over time. Earth Track recommends that this could be improved by adopting a regular, pre-announced schedule for analysis; recalibrating previous subsidy estimates when methodologies are updated; and adopting a more systematic review of subsidies to the energy sector.
   
• In the EIA's past two studies, the U.S. Congress has instructed that some policies cannot be included as subsidies. In its last study, in 2008, the EIA's lack of reference to non-governmental organisations also suggests that its use of information sources may be restricted. Earth Track recommends that the EIA should have the freedom to scope its work as needed and any restrictions should be made public.
   
• There are various areas in which the EIA could improve specific aspects of its estimation, such as using range estimates instead of point estimates for subsidies that are not cash payments; including analysis of the impact of subsidies on new investments; and disaggregating subsidies to renewable-energy technologies into different categories.

For each problem it identifies, the report also provides a rough indication of how much it might increase the EIA's total subsidy estimates if it were corrected, and which types of energy would see the largest increases in reported subsidies.

The report can be downloaded from Earth Track's website.