Topic Climate Policy

(Re)Integrating Radioactive Materials and Waste into a Global Sustainable Development Context

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, established in 2015, aim to achieve global sustainability by 2030 through the improvement of environmental, social, and economic parameters. However, unlike earlier concepts such as the Agenda 21 of 1992, the SDGs overlook radioactive waste management and related challenges of radiation itself. First, we investigate the historic consideration ...

Measuring the Dunkelflaute: How (not) to Analyze Variable Renewable Energy Shortage

As variable renewable energy (VRE) sources increasingly gain importance in global energy systems, there is a growing interest in understanding periods of VRE shortage ('Dunkelflauten'). Defining, quantifying, and comparing such shortage events across different renewable generation technologies and locations presents a surprisingly intricate challenge. Various methodological approaches exist in different ...

Energy Asset Stranding in Resource-Rich Developing Countries and the Just Transition: A Framework to Push Research Frontiers

Climate policy will inevitably lead to the stranding of fossil energy assets such as production and transport assets for coal, oil, and natural gas. Resource-rich developing countries are particularly affected, as they have a higher risk of asset stranding due to strong fossil dependencies and wider societal consequences beyond revenue disruption. However, there is only little academic and political ...

Enabling Circular Economy Dynamics in the Plastics and Steel Industries

This paper investigates the perspectives of stakeholder groups in the plastic and steel value chains on transitioning toward a circular economy (CE). Through semistructured interviews with 31 business stakeholders, we analyze business strategies, key factors, challenges and opportunities, as well as coordination and regulatory needs for a successful industry-wide CE transition. Our findings highlight ...

Five Essays in Macroeconomics

Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian models (HANK)---which replace the representative household by a whole distribution of households---are the about to become the new state-off-the-art model of modern monetary economics because they allow for more realistic consumption patterns of households and a rich description of income and wealth distributions. This PhD thesis contributes to the ongoing advancements ...

The Future Is Battery Electric: Climate Change Mitigation in Road Freight Transport

Road freight transport must switch to alternative drive technologies, such as battery-electric or hydrogen vehicles, to mitigate its impact on the climate. Preliminary results from an ongoing research project show that the fleet of battery-electric trucks as well as the number of models on offer have recently grown significantly, albeit from a very low level. This is not the case for hydrogen trucks. ...

Sufficiency as a “Strategy of the Enough”: Curbing Ecological Crises and Injustices: A Summary of the German Advisory Council on the Environment’s Discussion Paper

A recent discussion paper Sufficiency as a “Strategy of the Enough”: A Necessary Debate by the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) aims to intensify the debate on sufficiency, a central but neglected element of future-oriented policy. It defines sufficiency as the need to limit the consumption and production of ecologically critical goods and services, mainly by the economically rich, ...

Catalyzing the Transition to a Climate-Neutral Industry with Carbon Contracts for Difference: Commentary

Quantifying the Dunkelflaute: An Analysis of Variable Renewable Energy Droughts in Europe

Variable renewable energy droughts, also referred to as "Dunkelflaute", emerge as a challenge for realizing climate-neutral energy systems based on variable wind and solar power. Using data on 38 historic weather years and an advanced identification method, we characterize European drought events for on- and offshore wind power, solar photovoltaics, and policy-relevant renewable technology portfolios. ...

Coping with the Dunkelflaute: Power System Implications of Variable Renewable Energy Droughts in Europe

Coping with prolonged periods of low availability of wind and solar power, also referred to as "Dunkelflaute", emerges as a key challenge for realizing a decarbonized European energy system fully based on renewable energy sources. Here, we investigate the role of long-duration electricity storage and geographical balancing in dealing with such variable renewable energy droughts. To this end, we combine ...