Topic Enviromental Markets

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

Substituting Clean for Dirty Energy: A Bottom-Up Analysis

We fit CES and VES production functions to data from a numerical bottom-up optimization model of electricity supply with clean and dirty inputs. This approach allows for studying high shares of clean energy not observable today and for isolating mechanisms that impact the elasticity of substitution between clean and dirty energy. Central results show that (i) dirty inputs are not essential for production. ...

Policy Evaluation of Waste Pricing Programs Using Heterogeneous Causal Effect Estimation

Using machine learning methods in a quasi-experimental setting, I study the heterogeneous effects of introducing waste prices - unit prices on household unsorted waste disposal - on waste demands and municipal costs. Using a unique panel of Italian municipalities with large variation in prices and observables, I show that waste demands are nonlinear. I find evidence of constant elasticities at low ...

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 ...

Nuclear Power in the Twenty-first Century (Part II) - The Economic Value of Plutonium

Although plutonium has been studied by different disciplines (such as technology and innovation studies, political sciences) since its discovery, back in 1940 at the University of California (Berkeley), the resource and environmental economic literature is still relatively scarce; neither does the energy economic literature on nuclear power consider plutonium specifically, e.g. Davis (2012) or Lévêque ...

Low Emission Zones Improve Air Quality and Health but Temporarily Decrease Life Satisfaction

Air pollution results in high economic costs arising from its negative impacts on human health, especially in urban areas. Driving restriction policies such as low emission zones (LEZs) are designed to improve air quality. Indeed, empirical analyses in this Weekly Report confirm that LEZs reduce traffic-related air pollution. However, the analyses also reveal unintended adverse effects on secondary ...

Air Pollution and the Productivity of High-Skill Labor: Evidence from Court Hearings

Air pollution’s influence on cognitive productivity is a highly relevant and not fully understood economic issue. This study provides evidence of an adverse effect of exposure on the productivity of Mexican judicial workers. The empirical strategy approximates productivity with the length of the hearing and infers causality through instrumental variable panel models. Results show that nitrogen dioxides ...

Chances and Barriers for Germany’s Low Carbon Transition: Quantifying Uncertainties in Key Influential Factors

With the energy sector being one of the largest sources of global greenhouse-gas emissions, a swift change in the ways of energy generation and consumption is needed for a fulfilment of climate goals. But while the existence of global warming and the resulting need for action are widely agreed upon, there is a lot of discussion around the concrete measures and their timeline. A major cause of this ...

Ampel-Monitor Energiewende: der Stand der Dinge nach einem Jahr Ampel-Koalition