Europe's increasing import dependency in natural gas facilitates a number of new infrastructure projects. However, up to now it has always been difficult to assess the full impact of these projects as interdependencies within the whole European gas infrastructure system were hard to predict. We...

In this paper stochastic dynamic programming is used to investigate land conversion decisions taken by a multitude of landholders under uncertainty about the value of environmental services and irreversible development. We study land conversion under competition on the market for agricultural...

In this paper, we use stochastic dynamic programming to model the choice of a municipality which has to design an optimal waste management program under uncertainty about the price of recyclables in the secondary market. The municipality can, by undertaking an irreversible investment, adopt a...

The Stern/Nordhaus controversy has polarized the widely disparate beliefs about what to do in order to tackle the climate challenge. To explain differences in results and policy recommendations, comments following the publication of the Stern Review have mainly focused on the role played by the...

Renewable energy (RES-E) support schemes have to meet two requirements in order to lead to a cost-efficient renewable energy mix. First, RES-E support schemes need to expose RES-E producers to the price signal of the wholesale market, which incentivizes investors to account not only for the...

The economics of electricity is shaped by its physics. A well know example is the non-storability of electricity that causes its price to fluctuate widely. More generally, physical constraints cause electricity to be a heterogeneous good along three dimensions - time, space, and lead-time....

In the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, German nuclear policy has been reconsidered. This paper demonstrates the economic effects of an accelerated nuclear phase-out on the German electricity generation sector. A detailed optimization model for European electricity markets is...

In this paper, we develop a methodology for deriving a consistent measure for supply adequacy in the power generation sector. We especially consider the secured generation capacity of intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind. Availability of conventional power plants is estimated...

Electricity market models, implemented as dynamic programming problems, have been applied widely to identify possible pathways towards a cost-optimal and low carbon electricity system. However, the joint optimization of generation and transmission remains challenging, mainly due to the fact that...

Levels of CO2 emissions from electricity generation in the U.S. have changed considerably in the last decade. This development can be attributed to two factors. First, the shale gas revolution has reduced gas prices significantly, leading to a crowding out of the more CO2-intensive coal for...