Energy Prices and Carbon Taxes under Uncertainty about Global Warming

This paper extends the strategic interactions between producers of fossil fuels concerned about their profits and a taxing government concerned about the consumers’ welfare for uncertainty: global warming follows an Itô -process. Stochasticity requires to differentiate between reversible and irreversible emissions in contrast to the deterministic version. The unconstrained (= reversible) case allows for a closed form solution but not the more realistic and constrained case. Nevertheless interesting analytical properties (e.g. about when to stop emissions, implicit conservation due to monopolistic supply) are derived and complemented by a numerical example.     

Enhancing the EU’s Energy Supply Security—An Evaluation of the Nabucco Project and an Introduction to Its Open Season Capacity Allocation Process

The Russian dominance of the European Union (EU)’s natural gas supplies has put the independence of the EU at risk. This paper presents an evaluation of the Nabucco gas pipeline project—considered by some to be the most economical link to new natural gas sources—to determine whether it would help the EU to diversify its gas supplies in a cost-effective way, thus improving its energy supply security in future years. Furthermore, an introduction to the Nabucco Open Season Capacity Allocation Process is given. Applying empirical methods and competitive pipeline benchmarking analysis, three hypotheses related to the Nabucco natural experiment are evaluated: while hypothesis (1) focuses on the strength of demand for the Nabucco pipeline transportation capacities, hypotheses (2) and (3) examine fair usage rights and overall cost effectiveness of this project. Empirical results show that, due to the EU’s increasing long-term gas demand and decreasing indigenous production, there is a strong demand for the Nabucco gas pipeline by gas shippers. Furthermore, the empirical survey reveals that Nabucco provides a fair capacity allocation of fifty percent to third party shippers. Finally, competitive benchmarking shows Nabucco is indeed a cost-effective new pipeline and a link to fresh natural gas sources for Europe. Based on these results, it is anticipated that “Nabucco” will not only remain the name of a famous opera, but will also become the term associated with one of the most successful energy projects in Europe.     

Conservation Incentives for Consumers

This paper investigates profit-maximizing conservation incentives of a utility, where the interest in conservation results from prices regulated below the marginal costs of supply and where consumers differ with respect to their subjective time preference. Conventional least-cost planning implies that a program should focus on inefficient consumers (those who apply high discount rates). However, this scheme provokes strategic reactions of the consumers. Hence, incentive-compatible conservation schemes-one tied to efficiency, the other tied to electricity consumption-are derived that differ starkly from the above finding and from actual programs.     

OPEC’s Strategies

This paper investigates rationale explanations of OPEC??s strategies. Accounting for market characteristics in particular the sluggishness of demand and supply allows to explain price jumps as rational OPEC strategies from a narrow economic perspective (up and down) as well as from political objectives (at least up) due to the political payoff from standing up against the ??West??. Although the temptation to accrue this political payoff was and remains high, the narrow economic profit motive coupled with an imperfect cooperation among OPEC members explains past price volatility and high prices much better than the usual reference to political events. A more specific prediction is that OPEC will switch back to setting prices since the current quantity strategy encourages oil importing countries to appropriate rents in particular in connection with the need to mitigate global warming.     

Resource extraction by cartels facing constraints on cooperation

This paper considers a non-renewable resource cartel facing constraints on cooperation. Although different kinds of constraints are conceivable and some of them are also investigated, the analysis focuses on the case in which cooperation is restricted to sufficiently high quotas. This approach of imposing constraints on cartelization complements papers that assume exogenously when a monopoly ends (in particular Benchekroun, H., Gaudet, G., Van Long, N., 2006. Temporary natural resource cartels. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 52, 663–674) in two aspects: an endogenous determination when the cartel breaks up and the consequence that it is impossible to shift resource sales between the two regimes.     

Intertemporal monopolistic pricing of non-durables

This paper provides a tractable analytical framework to study intertemporal equilibria between non-competitive supply and dynamic demand for non-durable goods. The basic hypothesis is that consumers enjoy utility from particular services rather than from commodities. Consumption of the non-durable good follows a dynamic pattern, because it depends on the stock of durables and energy demand provides the prototypical example, e.g., mobility, thermal comfort, etc. are the output of a combination of durable and non-durable goods. Indeed, turmoils in energy markets are to a great deal due to short run inflexibility and this gives this theoretical paper a topical flavour. The outcomes differ substantially across the strategic setups while differences in expectations (myopic versus rational) matter only transiently but not in the long run.      

Analysis of United States' Utility Conservation Programs

This paper reviews the United States' experience with utility sponsored energy conservation programs. Such programs are central to the recent discussions about electric utility regulation in the United States and elsewhere. First it is shown that these programs are exposed to three problems on the consumers' side – rebound, adverse selection and moral hazard – which lower the effectiveness of conservation incentives and impede in most practical cases a reliable quantification of the achieved conservation. Moreover, the utilities have under the regulatory practice an incentive to invest in conservation measures but to limit factual conservation through a proper design of the program. Reviewing the recent literature shows that these four crucial points, which affect many of the applied conservation programs, are either insufficiently covered (rebound and adverse selection) or neglected entirely (moral hazard and regulated utilities' interest in little conservation). We conclude, that this undertaking has resulted in insignificant conservation and doubt the adequacy of these programs to reduce external social costs from energy use.     

Stability and limit cycles in one-dimensional dynamic optimisations of competitive agents with a market externality

This paper considers low dimensional (more precisely, one state variable) dynamic optimisation problems of competitive agents. These individual decisions lead to a dynamic externality for the evolution of the system. However, the impact of an individual and competitive agent is negligible and thus each agent considers this evolution as exogenous data. This leads, assuming rational expectations (perfect foresight due to the deterministic set up), to motions in the three dimensional space of state, costate and externality. Considering the fact that such externalities are widespread, e.g., R&D in the literature on new growth theory, pollution in environmental economics, etc., the incorporation of such externalities due to competitive markets is important, yet this incorporation may alter the stability of the system. Indeed, complex policies such as stable limit cycles are sustainable in such a low-dimensional economy, even for a separable and strictly concave model.