Residential buildings strongly contribute to global CO2 emissions due to the high energy demand for electricity and heating, particularly in industrialised countries. Within the EU, decentralised heat generation is of particular relevance for future climate policy, as its emissions are not...

In this paper, we identify key drivers and barriers for the adoption of building energy retrofits in Germany, which is promoted by public policy as an important measure to address the future challenges of climate change and energy security. We analyze data from a 2009 survey of more than 400...

We study how consumer search affects pricing in markets with incumbents and entrants using panel data on German electricity retail markets. Consumers observe the baseline price of the incumbent and decide whether or not to search. Incumbent providers can price discriminate between searching and...

Germany has committed itself to reducing its carbon emissions by 25 percent in 2005 as compared to 1990 emission levels. To achieve this goal, the government has recently launched an environmental tax reform which entails a continuous increase in energy taxes in conjunction with a...

Today, more than 70% of the world's total electricity production is supplied by power plants using conventional fossil fuels. Coal accounts for more than half of the fossil fuel combustion in electricity plants. Future mega trends give reason to believe that electricity demand will double until...

The efficiency of electricity generation in hard coal fired power plants varies considerably from country to country and over time. These differences occur both between developing and developed countries and between industrialised nations. The econometric analysis presented in this paper tests...

This article investigates mean risk hedging with respect to limited liquidity and studies the impact of different risk measures on the hedging strategies. For motivation and application purposes hedging in electricity markets is chosen, because the relevant hedging markets are characterized by...

The amount of materials used worldwide in production and consumption increased by 56 per cent from 1995 to 2008. Using an index decomposition analysis based on the logarithmic mean divisia index, we investigate the drivers of material use, both on a global and a country scale. We exploit a panel...

Der deutsche Strommarkt ist im Umbruch. Strom aus erneuerbaren Quellen verdrängt solchen aus konventioneller Erzeugung. Gleichzeitig wird immer mehr Elektrizität im Norden Deutschlands produziert und muss zu den Verbrauchern im Süden transportiert werden. Die bestehende Marktordung fordert...

We investigate the impact of consumer search and competition on pricing strategies in Germany’s electricity retail. We utilize a unique panel dataset on spatially varying search requests at major online price comparison websites to construct a direct measure of search intensity and combine...