The North and Baltic Sea Grid is one of the largest pan-European infrastructure projects raising high hopes regarding the potential of harnessing large amounts of renewable electricity, but also concerns about the implementation in largely nationally dominated regulatory regimes. The paper develops three idealtype development scenarios and quantifies the technical-economic effects: i) the Status quo ...
Between 2002 and 2007, Germany introduced its National Strategy for Sustainable Development and its Integrated Climate Protection Program, which both defined clear energy and climate-related objectives, setting an emissions reduction trajectory of 40% below the 1990 level by 2020. This spurred the development and refinement of a set of policies to create incentives for energy efficiency improvements, ...
The German government has committed to reducing the primary energy demand of buildings by 80% by 2050 and to attaining a thermal retrofit rate of 2%. Achieving both goals will require deep thermal retrofits across the existing building stock. To meet this challenge, the government is exploring what role tax support options could play in encouraging thermal retrofits and ensuring that they deliver the ...
The Eurozone is still stuck in a downward spiral: high public and private debts weigh on potential growth; gloomy prospects for growth prevent the further reduction of these debts. A European plan to support growth should be a complement, and not a substitute, to the ongoing efforts to reduce public deficits. It should both encourage structural reforms and incentivize investments. In the short term, ...
Before 2004 South Africa was the dominant steam coal exporter to the European market. However a new market situation with rising global demand and prices makes room for a new entrant: Russia. The hypothesis investigated in this paper is that the three incumbent dominant firms located in South Africa and Colombia reacted to that new situation by exerting market power and withheld quantities from the ...