China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

We compare a range of energy efficiency policies in a durable good market subject to both energy-use externalities and price-quality discrimination by a monopolist. We find that the social optimum can be achieved with differentiated subsidies. With ad valorem subsidies, the subsidization of the...

Energy efficiency is one of the key crossroads between energy, climate and economic issues. In fact, it represents one of the most cost effective ways to enhance security of energy supply, to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and to enhance economic competitiveness at one fell swoop. This...

Traditional large appliances absorb a large share of residential electricity consumption and represent important targets of energy policy strategies aimed at achieving energy security. Despite being characterized by rather mature technologies, this group of appliances still offers large...

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...

Improving end-use energy efficiency - that is, the energy-efficiency of individuals, households, and firms as they consume energy - is often cited as an important element in efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Arguments for improving energy efficiency usually rely on the idea that...

We analyse variations of carbon emissions in the European cement industry from 1990 to 2011, at the European level (EU 27), and at the national level for six major producers (Germany, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy and Poland). We apply a Log-Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method, crossing data...

It can be argued that one way to reduce the dependence from external energy sources, is simply to reduce the demand for energy. Energy savings may thus be considered a policy priority when concerns for energy security are particularly strong. Drawing on an original econometric approach, we check...

In addition to the already present Climate and Energy package, the European Union (EU) plans to include a binding target to reduce energy consumption. We analyze the rationales the EU invokes to justify such an overlapping and develop a minimal common framework to study interactions arising from...

China’s unbundling reform in 2002 aimed to introduce competitiveness into the power industry, especially the generation sector, to improve its operational efficiency. Meanwhile, great concern about a range of environmental problems and global climate change increasingly calls for saving energy...