Kibera is a large informal settlement, in Nairobi, Kenya where electricity access is presently expensive, intermittent, and dirty. The context of Kibera also speaks to larger global dynamics of rapid urbanization, the creation of an urban poor, the transitory experience of informal settlements, and the role of non-governmental actors; each of which provides challenges to…
Book Reviews
Prosumage and the future regulation of utilities: An introduction
The objective of this EEEP symposium is to assess recent developments in prosumage- including technical and economic trends, the impacts of different regulatory settings, and their relationships to utility strategy and regulation in the light of recent trends-and to sketch out potential future pathways. The symposium brings together in-depth analyses of the prosumage phenomenon and…
Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards for Appliances: Old and New Economic Rationales
We revisit Hausman and Joskow (1982)’s economic rationales for appliance minimum energy efficiency standards. In addition to the four market failures they argued could justify appliance standards – energy prices below marginal social cost, consumers underestimating energy prices, consumer discount rates above social discount rates, and principal-agent problems – we discuss two additional market failures…
Book Reviews
How Incumbent Cultural and Cognitive Path Dependencies Constrain the ‘Scenario Cone’: Reliance on Carbon Dioxide Removal due to Techno-bias
Scenario analysis is widely used to assess long-term development necessary to reach climate targets. Mitigation measures in these scenarios concentrate on supply-side technology solutions, while little attention has been paid to demand side solutions. One suite of included technologies are carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDR). Most scenarios rely heavily on CDR to limit global warming…
Lessons from Modeling 100% Renewable Scenarios Using GENeSYS-MOD
The main aim of models has never been to provide numbers, but insights. Still, challenges prevail for modelers to use the best configuration of their models to provide helpful insights. In the case of energy system modelling, this becomes even more complicated due to increasing complexity of the energy system transition through the potential and…
Long-term Energy and Climate Scenarios – An Introduction
This EEEP-symposium on “Long-term energy and climate scenarios” provides comprehensive coverage of the theory and practice of scenarios on energy and climate futures. The objective of this symposium is to contribute to the debate with a discussion of both, political economy aspects of scenario making, either positive and/or normative, but also on concrete scenarios on…
Use and Abuse of Energy and Climate Scenarios—A Week of Controversy on Scenarios
Energy and climate scenarios, and all other scenarios, are controversial, because they touch strategic issues, and also affect very basic operational discussion, such as the choice of the fuel mix, or the degree of trading between companies and nations. This article documents a controversial exchange of ideas via email between the two opponents, about energy…
Energy Outlooks Compared: Global and Regional Insights
We compare prominent global energy scenarios of organizations and companies. We supplement the analysis with four own scenarios, which were derived from structured analytic techniques in combination with a numerical global energy and resource market model (Multimod). Our paper provides three central contributions: (i) a compact survey of selected outlooks with meta characteristics (conceptual nature,…