Energie : papiers de recherche moissonnés (9 juin 2015)

Can EU’s Decarbonisation Agenda Break the State-Company Axis in the Power Sector? / Thomas Sattich, Inga Ydersbond, Daniel Scholten. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, 2015, 44 p. (nota di lavoro ; 2015.051)

Authors’s abstract : Europe’s power system is still marked by a distinct national component, and despite some regions with strongly integrated power systems, electricity supply today still has a largely national basis. Policies to decarbonise the power sector may fundamentally alter this situation, because power generation from renewable, carbon-neutral sources may require large, flexible, and heterogenic power pools as backdrop for efficient operation. Integration of little or non-integrated parts of the European power system is therefore a key element for the successful transition of the European power sector towards more renewables. But a development which fosters integration, growing transmission distances and bigger markets will likely lead to a reshuffling of allocation of power generation capacity in Europe. As with any fundamental policy change, decarbonisation of the power sector will create new winners and losers. Moreover, an integrated power system will probably cause new dependencies on the good-will of neighbouring countries. Europe is hence confronted with a ‘catch-22’: On the one hand, policy makers see the advantages of renewables and the exploitation of domestic energy resources, yet the necessary adaptations of power generation, distribution and consumption implies the risk of ‘harming’ the national power sector. EU policies to increase renewables and to create an internal energy market (IEM) thus aim at ameliorating this situation by e.g. both stimulating construction of renewable energy infrastructure and creating more interconnectors between member states. But due to various interests at the national level, member states’ levels of ambitions in contributing to achieving these overarching targets vary a lot. The instruments the European Union has at her hands will therefore have to be refined if the reluctance of member states to integrate power systems is to be overcome.

Future Costs of Key Low-Carbon Energy Technologies: Harmonization and Aggregation of Energy Technology Expert Elicitation Data / Erin Baker, Valentina Bosetti, Laura Diaz Anadon, Max Henrion, Lara Aleluia Reis. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, 2015, 35 p. (nota di lavoro ; 2015.045)

Authors’s abstract : In this paper we standardize, compare, and aggregate results from thirteen surveys of technology experts, performed over a period of five years using a range of different methodologies, but all aiming at eliciting expert judgment on the future cost of five key energy technologies and how future costs might be influenced by public R&D investments. To enable researchers and policy makers to use the wealth of collective knowledge obtained through these expert elicitations we develop and present a set of assumptions to harmonize them. We also aggregate expert estimates within each study and across studies to facilitate the comparison. The analysis showed that, as expected, technology costs are expected to go down by 2030 with increasing levels of R&D investments, but that there is not a high level of agreement between individual experts or between studies regarding the technology areas that would benefit the most from R&D investments. This indicates that further study of prospective cost data may be useful to further inform R&D investments. We also found that the contributions of additional studies to the variance of costs in one technology area differed by technology area, suggesting that (barring new information about the downsides of particular forms of elicitations) there may be value in not only including a diverse and relatively large group of experts, but also in using different methods to collect estimates.

Turkish Stream: What Strategy for Europe ? / Manfred Hafner, Simone Tagliapietra. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, June 2015, 32 p. (FEEM Nota di lavoro ; 2015.050)

Authors’s abstract : On December 1, 2014 Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised the energy world by announcing, during a state visit to Turkey, the demise of the long-planned South Stream pipeline project and the launch of a new project to evacuate Russian gas to Turkey and South-East Europe bypassing Ukraine: Turkish Stream. Since 2007 South Stream has represented a key element of the discussions concerning the EU security of gas supply and the overall EU-Russia relations. For this reason, the unexpected demise of South Stream and the quick rise of Turkish Stream need to be carefully evaluated both under the economic and geopolitical perspectives. This paper will first provide an overview of the Russian gas export strategy to Europe in order to entrench the current discussion on the major long-term trends concerning the issue. On the basis of this analysis the paper will then discuss the future prospects of Turkish Stream, arguing that the EU could seize this new reality to launch the formation of a fluid, reliable and interconnected South-Eastern European regional gas hub.

The Energy Community, the Energy Charter Treaty and the Promotion of EU Energy Security / Rafael Leal-Arcas & Andrew Filis. Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies, June 2015, 40 p. (Research Paper N° 203/2015).

Abstract : The European Union (EU) is for its most part dependent on the world outside its borders for a steady and secure energy supply. The EU borders, or is close to, areas rich in energy-related natural resource endowments – such as Russia, the Caspian Sea, the Middle East and North Africa regions, and Norway – from where the bulk of energy imports into the EU are sourced. The collapse of the Soviet Union and of the bureaucratic regimes in Central and Eastern Europe – which precipitated the opening up of those economies to globalization and its attendant processes – has increasingly made their energy-related natural resource endowments available on global markets. Developed, yet energy-poor, Western economies – many of which have galvanized behind the EU – saw opportunities to enhance their energy security through those economies on the brink of collapse. To that end, the EU has sought to entangle those energy-rich (or otherwise ‘energy-significant’ states, e.g., regarding energy transit) areas into multilateral regimes – such as those based on the Energy Charter Treaty and the Energy Community. While both these special regimes count among their numbers several parties that are not EU member states, they are not neutral in their ontology, given that these regimes, since their inception, are inherently linked to the energy interests of EU economies. The present chapter presents an analysis of these regimes and their systemic relationship to the EU.

Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Renewable Energy: A Meta-Regression Analysis / Chunbo Ma, Abbie A. Rogers, Marit E. Kragt, Fan Zhang, et al. University of Western Australia, School of Agricultural and Resource Economics, June 2015, 29 p. (Working Papers ; 1509)

Author’s abstract : Using renewable energy for domestic consumption has been identified as a key strategy by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Critical to the success of this strategy is to know whether consumers are willing to pay to increase the proportion of electricity generated from renewable energy in their electricity portfolio. There are a number of studies in the literature that report a wide range of willingness to pay estimates. In this study, we used a meta-regression analysis to determine how much of the variation in willingness to pay reflects true differences across the population and how much is due to study design, such as survey design and administration, and model specification. The results showed that factors that influence willingness to pay in individual studies, such as renewable energy type, consumers’ socio-economic profile and consumers’ energy consumption patterns, explain less variation in willingness to pay estimates than the characteristics of the study design. We also found that consumers have significantly higher willingness to pay for electricity generated from solar or generic renewable energy source (i.e. not a specific source) than wind, hydro or biomass. Due to the effect of study design on willingness to pay, we recommend that policy makers exercise caution when interpreting and using willingness to pay results from primary studies.

Electrical Energy Storage – Economics and Challenges / Michael Pollitt and Karim Anaya, Energy World Magazine, April 2015.

Increasing energy storage will allow electricity grids to become more flexible and able to integrate a higher proportion of intermittent renewable energy. However, as Karim L Anaya and Michael G Pollitt explain, there is still some way to go to iron out the commercial and regulatory issues.

Danièle Revel

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