This paper presents an overview of the main issues associated with the economics of offshore wind. Investment in offshore wind systems has been growing rapidly throughout Europe, and the technology will be essential in meeting EU targets for renewable energy in 2020. Offshore wind suffers from...

On windy days, Denmark tends to export electricity to its neighbours, and to import power on calm days. Storing electricity in this way thus allows the country to deal with the intermittency of wind generation. We show that this kind of behaviour is theoretically optimal when a region with wind...

The present dynamic security environment forced organizations or countries to radically restructure their objectives and strategies. In the last years, the European Union energy strategy has been in the process of a profound objectives transformation. The paper deals with the problem of the...

China had been singled out by Western politicians and media for dragging its feet on international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, the accusations previously always targeted on the U.S. To put such a criticism into perspective, this paper provides some reflections on China’s stance and...

The persistent uncertainty about mid-century CO2 emissions targets is likely to affect not only the technological choices that energy-producing firms will make in the future but also their current invest- ment decisions. We illustrate this effect on CO2 price and global energy transition within...

In this paper, we apply a spread-based real options approach to analyze the decision-making problem of an investor who has the choice between an irreversible investment in a condensing power plant without heat utilization and a plant with combined heat-and-power (CHP) generation. Our...

This study uses the methods of experimental economics to investigate possible causes for the failure of the Hotelling rule for nonrenewable resources. We argue that as long as resource stocks are high enough, producers may choose to (partially) ignore the dynamic component of their production...

In this paper we study the demand for car kilometres in two-car households, focusing on the substitution between cars in response to fuel price changes. We use a large sample of detailed Danish data on two-car households to estimate -- for each car owned by the household -- own and cross-price...

We perform a meta-analysis of studies investigating consumers' preferences for electric and other alternative fuel vehicles to provide insights into the way consumers trade off driving range for capital costs. We find that consumers are willing to pay, on average, between 47 and 64 USD for a...

With liberalization in 1998, numerous firms have entered the German retail electricity market, including newly formed cooperatives. Based on Transaction Cost Economics, we develop a theoretical framework seeking to explain preferences for electricity supplied by cooperatives from a consumer...