Energie : papiers de recherche moissonnés (2 septembre 2015)

Achieving a cost-competitive offshore wind power industry: What is the most effective policy framework? / Craig Brown, Rahmatallah Poudineh & Benjamin Foley. Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, Aug. 2015, 40 p. (OIES paper: EL 15) http://www.oxfordenergy.org/2015/09/achieving-a-cost-competitive-offshore-wind-power-industry-what-is-the-most-effective-policy-framework/

The promise of carbon-free, utility-scale power generation from offshore wind farms is encouraging a number of governments to implement policy support frameworks and national targets for offshore wind power generation. However, the high capital requirements for the deployment of offshore wind have proven that it is an expensive approach to meeting national renewable energy and carbon reduction targets, relative to other power generation sources. The capital requirement for offshore wind farms will be pushed even higher as consented development zones move further from shore and into deeper waters. In this paper, we analyse the major capital cost drivers of offshore wind plants and the implications of various policy frameworks on overall cost reductions for the industry. According to the results of our analysis, this issue – whether the promotion of scalability, or of competition for subsidies, will be more effective in driving down industry-wide costs – is highly market specific. Competitive policies are likely to be most effective when the market size is sufficiently large, whereas enhancing scale is more effective in nascent markets. However, we caution that in either case, the public costs of policies directly supporting offshore wind must be reconciled with the cost of supporting other low-carbon and zero-carbon technologies that may be equally as effective in helping governments achieve renewable energy and carbon reduction targets.

Endogenous economic growth, EROI, and transition towards renewable energy / Victor Court, Pierre-André Jouvet and Frédéric Lantz. Paris : Chaire Economie du climat, sept 2015, 36 p. (working paper ; n° 2015-07) http://www.chaireeconomieduclimat.org/publications/initiatives-de-recherche/wp-2015-07-endogenous-economic-growth-eroi-and-transition-towards-renewable-energy/

Abstract : Due to their initial lack of emphasis on energy and natural resources, exogenous and endogenous growth models have suffered the same critic regarding the limits to economic growth imposed by finite Earth resources. Thus, various optimal control models that incorporate energy or natural resources have been developed during the last decades. However, in all these models the importance of the Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROI) has never been raised. The EROI is the ratio of the quantity of energy delivered by a given process to the quantity of energy consumed in this same process. Hence, the EROI is a measure of the accessibility of a resource, meaning that the higher the EROI the greater the amount of net energy delivered to society in order to support economic growth. The present article build a bridge upon the vacuum lying between the different literatures related to endogenous economic growth, the EROI and the necessary transition from nonrenewable to renewable energy. We provide an endogenous economic growth model subject to the physical limits of the real world (i.e. fossil and renewable energy production costs have functional forms that respect physical constraints). The model is able to reproduce (based on world data) an increasing reliance on fossil fuels from an early renewable era and the subsequent inevitable transition towards complete renewable energy that human will have to deal with in a not-too-far future. Through simulation we define the conditions for having a smooth transition from fossil to renewable energy and we study in which circumstances this transition can have negative impacts on economic growth (peak followed by a degrowth phase). In such cases, the implementation of a carbon tax can partially smooth this unfortunate dynamics depending on the ways of use of the carbon tax income.

Danièle Revel

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