The United Nations General Assembly declared 2012 the 'International Year of Sustainable Energy for All', officially recognizing the urgent need to put energy at the centre of the global development agenda. In parallel, a strong international policy effort is being made to achieve the goal of...

This study investigates the connection between rent-seeking behaviour, corruption activity and quality of institutions to empirically evaluate the unexpected implications of an energy policy for criminal activity. The object of this research is a program of public subsidies introduced in Italy...

It is expected that the renewable share of energy generation will rise considerably in the near future. The intermittent and uncertain nature of renewable energy (RE) calls for storage and grid management technologies that can allow for increased power system flexibility. To assist policy makers...

Mitigation-Process Integrated Assessment Models (MP-IAMs) are used to analyze long-term transformation pathways of the energy system required to achieve stringent climate change mitigation targets. Due to their substantial temporal and spatial aggregation, IAMs cannot explicitly represent all...

In this paper a real option model is developed to examine the critical factors affecting the decision to lease agricultural land to a company installing a PV power plant. The leasing payment is certain while the net revenues from agriculture are uncertain. We identify the profit values at which...

Over the past three years Italy has witnessed a rapid growth in the photovoltaic energy market, followed by an equally sudden decline when the government decided to reduce the incentives. This sharp change in the trend of the market calls into question the achievement of Grid Parity and the...

This paper estimates the welfare-optimal market share of wind and solar power, explicitly taking into account their output variability. We present a theoretical valuation framework that consistently accounts for output variability over time, forecast errors, and the location of generators in the...

We extend the WITCH model to consider the possibility to produce and trade electricity generated by large scale concentrated solar power plants in highly productive areas that are connected to the demand centres through High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cables. We find that it becomes optimal...

We couple a spatially homogeneous energy balance climate model with an economic growth model which incorporates two potential policies against climate change: mitigation, which is the traditional policy, and geoengineering. We analyze the optimal policy mix of geoengineering and mitigation in...

The European Union has set ambitious targets for emission reduction and the penetration of renewable energy, including the electricity generation sector as one of the major emitters of CO2. After a period of subsidy-driven investments, the costs of renewables decreased strongly making...