Decarbonizing the global energy matrix through investments in renewable energy (RE) is considered a pathway to mitigate the effects of global climate change. Auctions have become an increasingly popular policy instrument for this purpose. In the last few years, auctions have been rapidly adopted...

Power production from renewable energies is supported through special support schemes in almost all industrialised countries. This is because they are generally not competitive today although their use offers a number of benefits that are not considered by energy markets. These support schemes...

The German response to the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was possibly the most significant change of policy towards nuclear power outside Japan, leading to a sudden and very significant shift in the underlying power generation structure in Germany. This provides a very useful natural...

The 2014 reform of the German Renewable Energy Act introduces a mandatory shift from a fixed feed-in tariff to a floating premium system. This is envisaged to create additional incentives for project developers, but also impacts revenues and costs for new investments in wind generation. Thus...

This paper exploits the exogeneity of weather conditions to evaluate renewable energy (RE) subsidy programs in Germany and Spain in terms of their costs for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. We find that both the aggregate costs and the distribution of costs between energy producers and...

This brief paper accompanies the Green Energy and Jobs tool, which is a simple excel-based tool to estimate the job-creation potential of greening the electricity sector. Specifically, it calculates the net job gains or losses from increasing the level of energy efficiency, and from increasing...