Author: admin
Consumers or prosumers, customers or competitors? – Some Australian perspectives on possible energy users of the future
Governance arrangements for electricity industries commonly claim the interests of consumers as their paramount objective. This would suggest a key decision making role for energy users, in all their diversity. However, the industry’s critical role in societal, welfare, large environmental impacts, and the challenges of ensuring it’s secure and reliable operation, all represent key shared…
Does adaptive capacity reduce funding costs of municipalities that are exposed to climate change risk?
Research shows that municipalities that face more risk from climate change have higher financing costs than municipalities that face less risk. However, to our best knowledge, it is unknown whether the adaptive capacity of a municaplity is rewarded in terms of lower financing costs. We study municipal bonds issued by U.S. municipalities that are known…
Comparing Regulatory Designs for the Transmission of Offshore Wind Energy
Offshore wind plays an ever-increasing role for the global transition to renewable energy. For offshore wind energy to be successful, cost-effective transport of the produced electricity to shore is necessary. The development and operation of the offshore transmission asset is costly and regulated differently across the globe. In most countries, the TSO is responsible for…
Analytics on Pricing Signals in Peer-to-Peer Solar Microgrids in Bangladesh
Solar microgrids enabling peer-to-peer energy exchange among off-grid households are poised to contribute to electrifying rural areas in the Global South. This novel approach provides underserved communities with affordable, green and reliable energy access, capable of powering higher-tier consumer as well as productive-use appliances. To ensure these microgrids can be run sustainably, this paper seeks…
Running Randomized Field Experiments for Energy Efficiency Programs: A Practitioner’s Guide
Researchers and professional evaluators are increasingly turning to randomized field experiments to evaluate energy efficiency programs and policies. This article provides a brief overview of several experimental methods and discusses their application to energy efficiency programs. We highlight experimental designs, such as randomized encouragement and recruit-and-deny, that are particularly well suited for situations where participation…
Model-Based Evaluation of Decentralised Electricity Markets at Different Phases of the German Energy Transition
This paper investigates decentralised markets in the German electricity system, defined as markets in specific regions in which regional electricity demand is met primarily by regional generation and the remaining demand is met on a system-wide level in a second step. The research question is: What impact do the size of decentralised markets and the…
Socio-technical Inertia: Understanding the Barriers to Distributed Generation in Pakistan
In a bid to promote renewable energy, Pakistan issued net-metering regulations in 2015 that allowed for on-site solar and wind generation. However, five years on, overall growth in Distributed Generation (DG) remains insignificant. Here we investigate the reasons why, focusing on solar prosumage and exploring the key barriers and challenges in the existing socio-technical regime….
Facilitating Transmission Expansion to Support Efficient Decarbonization of the Electricity Sector
Many governments, electric utilities, and large electricity consumers have committed to deep decarbonization of the electricity sector by 2050 or earlier. Over at least the next 30 years, achieving decarbonization targets will require replacing most fossil-fueled generators with zero carbon wind and solar generation along with energy storage to manage intermittency and for balancing more…
The Cost of Finance and the Cost of Carbon: A Case Study of Britain’s only PWR
This paper argues that the cost of decarbonising depends critically on the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC), illustrated with a case study of Sizewell B (SZB, the nuclear station commissioned in 1995). It calculates the cost per tonne of CO2 abated with prices set as for transmission assets by the regulator under the Regulatory…