Topic Enviromental Markets

Financing Power: Impacts of Energy Policies in Changing Regulatory Environments

Power systems with increasing shares of wind and solar power generation have higher capital and lower operational costs than traditional technologies. This increases the importance of the cost of finance for total system cost. We quantify how renewable policy design can influence cost of finance by addressing regulatory risk and facilitating hedging. We use interview data on wind power financing costs ...

Bridging the Industrial Energy Efficiency Gap: Assessing the Evidence from the Italian White Certificate Scheme

The Italian white certificate scheme is the main national policy instrument to incentivise energy efficiency of the industrial sector, with savings from white certificates amounting to 2% of Italy's 2012 primary energy consumption. The mechanism sets binding energy-saving targets on electricity and gas distributors with at least 50,000 clients and includes a voluntary opt-in model for participation ...

Productivity Measurement with Natural Capital

This paper proposes a measurement framework that explicitly accounts for the role of natural capital in productivity measurement. It is applied to aggregate economy data from the OECD Productivity Database, with natural capital data from the World Bank. It is shown that the direction of the adjustment to productivity growth depends on the rate of change of natural capital extraction relative to the ...

Environmental Policies and Productivity Growth: Evidence across Industries and Firms

This paper investigates the impact of changes in environmental policy stringency on industry- and firm-level productivity growth in a panel of OECD countries. To test the strong version of the Porter Hypothesis (PH), we extend a neo-Schumpeterian productivity model to allow for effects of environmental policies. We use a new environmental policy stringency (EPS) index and let the effect of countries׳ ...

Climate Friendly Materials Platform

Overview Basic materials, such as aluminium, cement and steel, are central to our economies, but their production accounts for around 16 percent of European and 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore difficult to envisage how Europe can reach the commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement without significant emission reductions from the materials sector. While some...

Emission Trading System in the Republic of Korea

The Economics of the EU ETS Market Stability Reserve: Introduction

Pricing Carbon Consumption: A Review of an Emerging Trend

Nearly every carbon price regulates the production of carbon emissions, typically at midstream points of compliance, such as a power plant. Over the last six years, however, policymakers in Australia, California, China, Japan, and Korea implemented carbon prices that regulate the consumption of carbon emissions, where points of compliance are farther downstream, such as distributors or final consumers. ...

Inclusion of Consumption into Emissions Trading Systems: Legal Design and Practical Administration

A world of unequal carbon prices requires measures aimed at preventing carbon leakage. Climate policy imperatives demand that such measures must be compatible with the goal of sending a carbon price signal down the value chain. For carbon intensive materials, the combination of dynamic free allocation combined with Inclusion of Consumption (IoC) into emissions trading systems such as the European Union ...

Quantifying Impacts of Consumption Based Charge for Carbon Intensive Materials on Products

After the Paris Climate Agreement, it is anticipated that carbon prices will differ across regions for some time. If countries use free allowance allocation as carbon leakage protection, only a fraction of carbon prices are passed through to consumers particularly by carbon intensive materials producers. Adding a consumption charge based on benchmarks applied to the material content can reinstate the ...