Topic Enviromental Markets

Geographical Balancing of Wind Power Decreases Storage Needs in a 100% Renewable European Power Sector

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, many countries plan to massively expand wind power and solar photovoltaic capacities. These variable renewable energy sources require additional flexibility in the power sector. Both geographical balancing enabled by interconnection and electricity storage can provide such flexibility. In a 100% renewable energy scenario of twelve central European countries, we investigate ...

Green Premiums Are a Challenge and an Opportunity for Climate Policy Design: Comment

Adjusting green public support programmes to green premiums can reduce public spending, yet this is challenged by uncertainty. Underfunding green technologies can delay the green transition, and overfunding them can increase transition costs. Both risks of under- and overfunding can be reduced using responsive adjustments.

Measuring Total Carbon Pricing

While countries increasingly commit to pricing greenhouse gases directly through carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, indirect forms of carbon pricing—such as fuel excise taxes and fuel subsidy reforms—remain important factors affecting the mitigation incentives in an economy. Taken together, how can policy makers think about the overall price signal for carbon emissions and the incentive it ...

Reducing Energy System Model Distortions from Unintended Storage Cycling through Variable Costs

Energy system models are used for policy decisions and technology designs. If not carefully used, models give implausible outputs and mislead decision-making. One implausible effect is “unintended storage cycling”, which is observable as simultaneous storage charging and discharging. Methods to remove such misleading effects exist, but are computationally inefficient and sometimes ineffective. Through ...

Kazakhstan: Decarbonisation Pathways towards a Net Zero Future by 2060 - The Opportunities and Challenges ahead: Final Report

Coase and Cap-and-Trade: Evidence on the Independence Property from the European Carbon Market

I examine the Coasean independence property in a large multinational cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, the EU Emissions Trading System. I analyze whether emissions of power producers are independent from allowance allocations by leveraging a change in allocation policy for a difference-in-differences strategy. The evidence suggests that the independence property holds overall and for ...

The EU Sustainable Finance Taxonomy and Its Contribution to Climate Neutrality

The EU Taxonomy is the first standardised and comprehensive classification system for sustainable economic activities. It covers activities responsible for up to 80% of EU greenhouse gas emissions and may play an important role in channelling investments into low-carbon technologies by helping investors to make informed decisions. However, especially in transition sectors much depends on the stringency ...

A Collective Blueprint, Not a Crystal Ball: Overcoming Political Stalemates: The German Stakeholder Commission on Phasing out Coal

The future of coal remains contested in many countries, hindering necessary energy transitions. Collaborative governance approaches, such as stakeholder commissions, have been proposed as potential solution to resolve such societal conflicts. In Germany, a stakeholder commission process managed to overcome the existing stalemate situation, leading to the adoption of a coal phase-out by 2038. Celebrated ...

Toward a Systemic Approach to Energy Transformation in Algeria

This paper examines the drivers of Algeria's energy transformation as well as the cross-cutting issues and challenges in the transformation process. It suggests a framework that accelerates sustainable transformation based on the ideologies of systemic reasoning. Interviews were conducted with 20 energy experts in Algeria, along with a content analysis of policy documents, reports, and previous studies. ...

The Energy-Price Channel of (European) Monetary Policy

This study examines whether central banks can combat inflation that is caused by rising energy prices. By using a high-frequency event study and a Structural Vector Autoregression, we find evidence that the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve (Fed) are capable of doing so by affecting domestic and global energy prices. This “energy-price channel” of monetary policy plays an important ...