Natural gas prices in Germany saw a strong increase at the end of 2021, subsequently worsening with the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, raising concerns about the distributional consequences. Our study shows that low-income households are affected the most by the natural gas price increase. Low-income households pay at the median 11.70 percent of their equivalent income on gas bills, ...
Designing auctions that favor low resource quality installations allows countries to geographically diversify their renewable energy production, while lowering payments to low-cost producers. In this paper, we develop a stylized model showing that a discriminatory auction design favoring low-wind-yield locations leads to a tradeoff between production costs and producer rent and that the scheme can ...
This paper sheds new light on the role of communication for cartel formation. Using machine learning to evaluate free-form chat communication among firms in a laboratory experiment, we identify typical communication patterns for both explicit cartel formation and indirect attempts to collude tacitly. We document that firms are less likely to communicate explicitly about price fixing and more likely ...
Whether additional natural gas infrastructure is needed or would be detrimental to achieving climate protection goals is currently highly controversial. Here we combine five perspectives to argue why expansion of the natural gas infrastructure hinders a renewable energy future and is no bridge technology. We highlight that natural gas is a fossil fuel with a significantly underestimated climate impact ...
Methane is the second-largest contributor to global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing anthropogenic methane emissions quickly can significantly reduce global warming within just a few decades. The oil and gas sector is responsible for almost 20% of anthropogenic methane emissions. Yet, there are hardly any policies in place that address oil and gas sector methane emissions. ...
Changing political conditions in Mexico threatens the future of clean energy inthe country. A competitive electricity market and ambitious environmental goalswere among the priorities of the previous administration, but the current administrationaims to increase revenues from the national power company and acquirecontrol of the electricity market at the expense of consumer welfare and the environment.In ...
Steam coal exporters face increasing uncertainty about future coal demand and risks of asset stranding. Nevertheless, new export-oriented coal mine projects are still brought forward. In this study, we use the coal sector model COALMOD-World to assess the economic prospects of investments in the export-oriented steam coal sector, and in particular of coal mines in the Galilee Basin, Australia. We parameterize ...