• Energy Research
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Abstract The housing growth programme could offer an opportunity for accelerating the deployment of decentralised renewable energy systems (DRES) in the UK. The Government hopes to leverage private sector investment into DRES as part of new housing projects. The aim of this paper is to assess whether current regulatory and funding frameworks are sufficient to achieve this. The question is explored by drawing on the experience of developers, local authorities, energy utilities and service companies operating in the largest housing growth region in the UK–Thames Gateway. Their experience suggests that the current low intervention approach will be insufficient to generate the shift required in both industries. In order to be more successful economic and regulatory instruments should focus on producers (house-builders and energy providers) rather than consumers (households). Tighter regulation is needed to ensure that producers have a responsibility to install DRES as part of new developments, to enable connection to the grid, to ensure a sustained financial return from investment and revenue is spent on the expansion of new renewable energy infrastructure. This regulatory framework must be under-pinned by substantial funds focused on producers. Greater intervention is needed if DRES is to be included in new housing development.

A brisk building boom of hydropower mega-dams is underway from China to Brazil. Whether benefits of new dams will outweigh costs remains unresolved despite contentious debates. We investigate this question with the "outside view" or "reference class forecasting" based on literature on decision-making under uncertainty in psychology. We find overwhelming evidence that budgets are systematically biased below actual costs of large hydropower dams - excluding inflation, substantial debt servicing, environmental, and social costs. Using the largest and most reliable reference data of its kind and multilevel statistical techniques applied to large dams for the first time, we were successful in fitting parsimonious models to predict cost and schedule overruns. The outside view suggests that in most countries large hydropower dams will be too costly in absolute terms and take too long to build to deliver a positive risk-adjusted return unless suitable risk management measures outlined in this paper can be affordably provided. Policymakers, particularly in developing countries, are advised to prefer agile energy alternatives that can be built over shorter time horizons to energy megaprojects.

Abstract This paper provides an overview of economic issues involved in timing limitations on CO2 emissions from energy systems. It highlights issues relating to technology availability, development and diffusion, and the inertia of energy systems, as being particularly important. The paper sets this in the context of wider uncertainties surrounding the problem and briefly considers other aspects relevant to timing. The paper is stimulated by the debate in the USA about optimal abatement paths, in particular recent claims that it would be economically preferable to defer such abatement action, in favour of measures that support technology development but do not affect emission trends for many years. This paper categorizes the various economic issues involved and concludes that for each economic argument that has been advanced to justify deferring emission constraints, there are counter-vailing economic arguments that could be used in support of rapid near term emissions abatement. Rational policy lies between these extremes. A policy of deferring all emissions abatement exposes economic systems and industries, as well as the environment, to significantly greater costs and risks than those arising from a more balanced approach. Furthermore the modelling studies that have been used to justify deferring emissions abatement do so because they embody the economic factors favourable to delay and largely neglect the countervailing issues, to the point where their results have little relevance to the overall problem of timing emissions abatement.

Abstract A recent article in this journal claimed to assess the socio-technical potential for onshore wind energy in Europe. We find the article to be severely flawed and raise concerns in five general areas. Firstly, the term socio-technical is not precisely defined, and is used by the authors to refer to a potential that others term as merely technical. Secondly, the study fails to account for over a decade of research in wind energy resource assessments. Thirdly, there are multiple issues with the use of input data and, because the study is opaque about many details, the effect of these errors cannot be reproduced. Fourthly, the method assumes a very high wind turbine capacity density of 10.73 MW/km2 across 40% of the land area in Europe with a generic 30% capacity factor. Fifthly, the authors find an implausibly high onshore wind potential, with 120% more capacity and 70% more generation than the highest results given elsewhere in the literature. Overall, we conclude that new research at higher spatial resolutions can make a valuable contribution to wind resource potential assessments. However, due to the missing literature review, the lack of transparency and the overly simplistic methodology, Enevoldsen et al. (2019) potentially mislead fellow scientists, policy makers and the general public.

Following the debate on the implications of international trade for global climate policy, this paper introduces the topic of the economic benefits from trade obtained by exporting countries in relation to the emissions generated in the production of exports. In 2008, 24% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 20% of the employment around the world were linked to international trade. China “exported” 30% of emissions and hosted 37.5% of the jobs generated by trade worldwide. The European Union and the United States of America were the destination of 25% and 18.4% of the GHG emissions embodied in trade. The imports of these two regions contributed to the creation of 45% of the employment generated by international trade. This paper proposes the idea of including trade issues in international climate negotiations, taking into account not only the environmental burden generated by developed countries when displacing emissions to developing countries through their imports, but also the economic benefits of developing countries producing the goods exported to developed countries.

Abstract If intermittent renewable energy technologies such as those based on solar, wind, wave and tidal resources are eventually to supply significant shares of total energy supplies, it is crucial that the energy storage problem is solved. There are several (long-recognised) possibilities ahead including compressed air, pumped storage, further developments in batteries, regenerable fuel cells, ‘super-capacitors’ and so forth. But one that is being revisited extensively by industry and research establishments is the production and storage of hydrogen from electricity at off-peak times, and in times when there would be a surplus of renewable energy, for reuse in the electricity, gas and transport markets; short-term and even seasonal and longer-term storage is technically feasible with this option. This paper looks at the costs of the option both in the near-term and the long-term relative to the current costs of electricity and natural gas supplies. While the costs of hydrogen would necessarily be greater than those of natural gas (though not disruptively so), when used in conjunction with emerging technologies for decentralised generation and combined heat and power there is scope for appreciable economies in electricity supply. A lot will depend on innovation at the systems level, and on how we operate our electricity and gas grids and regulate our electricity and gas industries. We have also suggested that we now need to experiment more, at the commercial level, and in the laboratories, with the hydrogen option.

Abstract This paper explores the use of fuelwood in Third World cities. The importance of fuelwood and the factors which condition its use in cities are set out and three fuelwood problems are identified: the cost to urban consumers, fuel supply security and the impact of urban fuelwood markets on rural areas. Urban fuelwood interventions are evaluated, with four categories identified: interventions in marketing, conservation, increased, wood production and fuel-switching. Of these, fuel-switching by improved supply systems and increased production from smallholders and better management of natural woodlands appear to have the greatest potential. The need for flexibility/community participation in planning is stressed.

The concept of energy justice has emerged as an important theoretical and methodological tool aiding to understand challenges in the extraction, production and consumption of energy, and its societal, economic, environmental and security implications. We apply energy justice as an analytical framework to analyse the political, societal and environmental impacts of energy policies in the context of post-conflict instability. Using the Kosovo C project as a case study, a planned lignite power plant and its associated infrastructure, we utilise the three tenets of energy justice (distributional, procedural, and justice as recognition) and eight aspects of just energy decision-making to depict the opportunities and challenges of the empirical application of energy justice in a post-conflict environment. The application of energy justice to the Kosovo case identifies the legal/regulatory and the temporal dimensions as crucial challenges to just energy policies in a context in which: (i) the lack of due process, good governance, and ongoing post-conflict tensions aggravate the societal, economic and environmental impacts of energy policies; (ii) accessibility and affordability of energy is prioritised over the promotion of sustainability; and (iii) intra- and intergenerational equity concerns take a backseat in the face of immediate state-building priorities.