This paper investigates the impact of ICT- and non-ICT capital, and of labour at different skill levels, on productivity and employment in the financial intermediation sector of twelve EU member countries plus the US and Japan. A stochastic possibility frontiers (SPF) approach is applied to...

The economics of large-scale combined heat and power (CHP) generation for district heating (DH) applications are strongly affected by the costs and allocation mechanism of CO2 emission allowances. In the next period of the European emission trading system (EU ETS), from 2013 onwards, the...

The battery size of a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) is decisive for the pure electrical range of the vehicle and crucial for the cost-effectiveness of this particular vehicle concept. Based on the energy consumption of a conventional reference car and a PHEV, we introduce a...

We develop a model of the European electricity market that allows analyzing the impact of consumers' price sensitivity, defined as the willingness to change energy providers, on equilibrium prices. The model is parameterized with publicly available data on total demand, marginal costs and...

Today's European utilities not only focus on electricity supply, but also offer exchange-traded “structured products” or portfolio management for unbundling financial and physical risk positions. Many utilities are only able to provide these services inside of their home markets, but in the...

The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of credit risk mitigation via margining on the optimal portfolio selection for power plants. We develop a model to estimate margining cashflows that is based on the clearing framework of the European Commodity Clearing AG (ECC), on stochastic...

Insight into the homeowner's adoption decisions in favor of a specific innovative residential heating system (RHS) helps us to understand and assess the dynamics of the adoption and diffusion of such technological systems as a "social" phenomenon. This phenomenon emerges from the individual...

The Integrated Energy and Climate Protection Program of the German government includes the political target to double the share of combined heat and power generation (CHP) in Germany from currently about 12% to 25% in 2020. In order to reach this goal a new CHP law was enacted to improve the...

In this paper we introduce HECTOR, a new and advanced long-term electricity market model that simulates market behavior bottom-up through opportunistic, variable cost-based bidding of individual power plants into auction-based national markets with international interconnection capacities....

The search for economically efficient policy instruments designed to promote the diffusion of renewable energy technologies in liberalized markets has led to the introduction of quota-based tradable 'green' certificate (TGC) schemes for renewable electricity. However, there is a debate about the...