In response to growing environmental concerns, governments have encouraged innovation and adoption of green or clean technologies through various policy measures. At present more than half a trillion US$ is being invested annually in clean technologies. This study analyzes if investments in clean technologies increase productivity and reduce production costs based on the existing literature….
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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…
Polar Vortexes in New England: Missing Money, Missing Markets, or Missing Regulation?
The 2014 and 2017-18 “polar vortex” events in New England served as virtual controlled experiments on how competitive natural gas and electricity markets coexist uneasily almost two decades after different kinds of regulatory restructuring initiatives freed different kinds of competitive forces to support the supply infrastructure in each energy market. As a region with no…
Solar Microgrids and Remote Energy Access: How Weak Incentives Can Undermine Smart Technology
This paper documents the challenges faced by one company, Gram Power, installing and operating solar microgrids in rural India. We begin by summarizing the existing literature on best practices for microgrid deployment. Although Gram Power followed nearly all of these recommendations, the company nevertheless faced significant challenges. First, demand for solar microgrids was very limited,…
Ownership Unbundling of Electricity Distribution Networks
Traditional restructuring of power markets has focused on legally separating monopolistic transmission and distribution infrastructure with sufficient regulatory oversight to ensure non-discriminatory access to networks, and transparent and cost-reflective tariffs. There is consensus that ownership separation for transmission assets is beneficial for competition and transparency. However, at the distribution level the benefits of going beyond…
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…
Clean Cooking: Why is Adoption Slow Despite Large Health and Environmental Benefits?
More than one-third of the world’s population, mainly the low-income group, still rely on traditional biomass fuels for household cooking. The indoor air pollution from household cooking is one of the main drivers of child mortality in developing countries. It also causes deforestation and emissions of black carbon. A large number of studies show that…
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…
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…
OPEC’s Pursuit of Market Stability
We investigate attempts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to stabilize the price of oil during the past fifty years. We first develop a novel decomposition of shifts in global demand and non-OPEC supply. This decomposition provides a fresh perspective on the debate over the relative importance of demand versus supply factors as…