The Energy

Before the mid-eighteenth century, most people lived in near-complete darkness except in the presence of sunlight and moonlight. Since then, the provision of artificial light has been revolutionised by a series of innovations in appliances, fuels, infrastructures and institutions that have enabled the growing demands of economic development for artificial light to be met at dramatically lower costs: by the year 2000, while United Kingdom GDP per capita was 15 times its 1800 value, lighting services cost less than one three thousandth of their 1800 value, per capita use was 6,500 times greater and total lighting consumption was 25,000
times higher than in 1800. The economic history of light shows how focussing on developments in energy service provision rather than simply on energy use and prices can reveal the ‘true’ declines in costs, enhanced levels of consumption and welfare gains that have been achieved. While emphasising the value of past experience, the paper also warns against the dangers of over-reliance on past trends for the long-run forecasting of energy consumption given the potential for the introduction of new technologies and fuels, and for rebound and saturation effects.

This paper evaluates three energy-sector market transformation programs: the Environmental Protection Agency's on-going Green Lights program to promote on-grid efficient lighting, the World Bank Group's new Photovoltaic Market Transformation Initiative, and the federal ...

We assess the value of stranded coal-fired power plants in Germany due to the critical phase-out by 2038. Within a Monte Carlo simulation, the scenarios under consideration (a slow decommissioning at the end of the technical lifetime in 2061, the highly probable phase-out by 2038, and an accelerated phase-out by 2030) are additionally assigned distributions to display the uncertainty of future developments. The results show an overall stranded asset value of €0.4 billion given the phase-out by 2038 and additional €14.3 billion if the phase-out is brought forward by eight years. This study also depicts the impacts of carbon pricing and the feed-in from renewable energy sources on the merit order and eventually the deterioration in economic conditions for hard coal and lignite power plants. Lastly, we illustrate immediate concerns for share prices of affected companies and contributes to closing the research gap between stranded physical and financial assets.

This paper examines efficient means of abating the greenhouse effect in Australia by reducing the emissions of CO2. It examines the generation of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in Australia, and analyses means to cut emissions from electricity generation and road transport. Finally ...

The coincident rise in crude oil prices and increased number of financial participants in the crude oil futures market from 2000-2008 has led to allegations that "speculators" drive crude oil prices. As crude oil futures peaked at $147/ bbl in July 2008, the role of speculators came under heated debate. In this paper, we employ unique data from the U.S.

Traditionally, economic analyses of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation focused on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy sources, while nonCO2 GHGs were not incorporated into the studies, due to the lack of data on abatement costs of non-CO2 GHGs. In recent years, ...

The expansion in the supply of energy services over the last couple of centuries has reduced the apparent importance of energy in economic growth despite energy being an essential production input. We demonstrate this by developing a simple extension of the Solow growth model, which we use to investigate 200 years of Swedish data. We find that the elasticity of substitution between a capital-labor aggregate and energy is less than unity, which implies that when energy services are scarce they strongly constrain output growth ...

ABSTRACT We consider some unintended effects of a technology treaty to increase the (stochastic) possibility of developing an energy alternative to fossil fuels which, when available, makes fossil fuels redundant. One implication of such a treaty is to increase the incentives for fossil-fuels producers to extract fossil fuels existing in given quantity more rapidly, under competition when the equilibrium price path for fossil fuels follows Hotellings rule. When the treaty may result in the new technology being immediately available, the expected resource extraction path is accelerated for an initial period, in simulations for 510 years, despite fossil fuels being phased out when the new technology appears. When there is a minimum (10-year) lag from treaty signing to technology implementation, expected extraction is speeded up for a longer period, 12-15 years. We discuss the implications of such treaties for global carbon emissions, which are not necessarily positive.

Reactive Power is a Cheap Constraint. ... Author Info. Edward Kahn Ross Baldick Abstract. Hogan (1993) has proposed a version of marginal cost pricing for electricity transmission transactions that include a component for reactive power to support voltage at demand nodes. ...