Search

The aim of this paper is to analyze the main determinants of the economic acceptability of four Green Technologies (GTs): alternative fuel vehicles, energy savings in residential buildings, smart meters and renewable electricity, using a meta-analysis on a sample of 35 selected papers, which provided 245 primary data. This approach allows detecting relationships across heterogeneous studies, avoiding the subjectivity of qualitative surveys. We implement a new two-step procedure. First, we compute a measure of the implicit price for a kilogram of CO2 avoided (PCO2), homogenizing the usable information for the GTs considered. Second, we conduct a meta-regression using the computed PCO2 values to estimate the socio-economic determinants' impact. In general, our results show a wide degree of acceptability for GTs which is stronger among European citizens. In particular, it emerges that, on average, the estimated PCO2 is positive for the GTs considered, and additional positive effects exist when respondents are confronted with an explicit reference to quantitative targets in terms of CO2 abatement, a clear proposal for payment timing, and a specific renewable electricity mix. These results indicate that information and transparency are crucial to spur GTs deployment. Therefore, to support GTs’ market penetration, public and private institutional stakeholders, have to provide “ad hoc” information to the end users, setting a clear and suitable system of prices to increase the economic value end users place on GTs.

In 1965, Singapore declared its independence and initiated a process of modernisation aiming to erase any evidence of its colonial past. Thedevelopmentalist orientation of Singapore, as Rem Koolhaas defined it, together with the formula “displace, destroy, replace,” became the theoretical instruments used to implement the urban vision for the future city. Singapore has thus become the contemporary urban laboratory of the Asia Pacific Region and due to its limited area for construction, turned into an experimental epicentre in the field of dense dwelling. A protagonist of this experimentation has been the Israeli/Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, designer of the Integrated resort casino Marina Bay Sands (2010), an exemplary feature of Singapore’s drive for development. This paper focuses on Safdie’s theoretical work, casting light on the ideological shift from his early modern residential project Habitat‘67, built during the Expo in Montreal (Canada) in 1967, to the contemporary residential complex Sky Habitat, completed in 2015 in Singapore. While Habitat’67 represented the manifesto of Safdie’s social utopia, envisaging itself as a prototypical residential component of the future city, Sky Habitat is a private gated community, which targets an upper-class market. And yet, Safdie’s two projects, distant in time and social ideals, display comparable strategies, as the use of similar architectural solutions and the permanence of urban modern utopian principles. These strategies underpin two other projects designed recently by Safdie in China: the Golden Dream Bay in Qinhuangdao (2016) and Chongqing Chaotianmen (design phase), which propose further elaboration of Sky Habitat’s urban principles. This paper will investigate how utopian urban strategies elaborated during the Modern period and advanced and tested in the 1960s and 1970s, have become material of experimentation for new forms of living in the congested 21st century city, evolving the concept of urban density in “the city that could be”.

In 2014, the European Commission proposed a new renewable energy sources (RES) target in energy consumption by 2030 “to be delivered collectively” by the European Union as a whole, leaving unresolved the question of allocation among member countries. The aim of this paper is to propose and simulate a model of coordinated action among member countries based on two pillars, RES national binding targets and a quantitative cost minimization procedure based on a general translog function. We have considered RES national targets in three sectors: electricity, heating and cooling, transport. RES costs are differentiated according to learning-by-doing and RES productivity diffusion processes at the various RES production sites in the European Union. Three different scenarios are simulated and compared with the baseline case constituted by the 2020 cumulative RES target. The results show that, compared with the baseline, the costs of achieving RES binding targets, with the proposed decision process, can be reduced by up to 13% by 2030. These cost evaluations indicate that it is more efficient to produce RES in those countries that face lower technology costs, according to the comparative advantages of their territorial localization and the importance of the initial RES policy efforts.

The promotion of renewable energy sources (RES) by governments is one way of helping countries to meet their energy needs while lowering greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, we examine the role of energy policy in RES promotion, based on a carbon tax and RES price subsidy, at a time of technological and demand shocks in the European Union (E.U.) 15 countries, the United States (U.S.) and China, focusing on the macroeconomic implications. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for RES and fossil fuels, our results suggest that, in the presence of a total factor productivity shock in the fossil fuel sector, such an energy policy can also be a driving force for smoothing the reduction of RES in the energy market (and vice versa). Additionally, we show that the E.U.15 grouping has a comparative advantage in terms of reaching grid parity compared with the other countries we considered which are more fossil fuel dependent.

Over the last years the European Union (EU) has implemented ambitious climate and energy targets for 2020, i.e. the 2020 Climate and Energy Package (Package), to become a highly efficient, low carbon economy. The Package assigns binding renewable energy sources (RES) target for each EU member countries. Indeed costs to reach Package's targets vary among EU countries, given heterogeneity among regions and different instruments implemented to spur RES deployment. The aim of our paper is to provide a policy tool for EU policy makers in the negotiation process that assigns achievable quantitative targets according to which countries are not inclined to deviate from the agreement. We compute potential extra costs that may arise when some EU countries fail to reach the assigned objective within the Package with reference to RES target. More generally, our simulation model is an instrument that allows EU policy makers to assess incentives that countries might have to participate or not to the environmental agreements. Our analysis shows that partial participation to the Package produces inefficiencies by rising costs for other participating countries to the environmental agreement. Finally, we propose a new policy mechanism based on progressive sanctions for countries that do not meet their national targets, which are proportional to the monetary value of the penalty they impose to the rest of the EU countries with their opportunistic behavior.

This study analyzes the attitude of Italian youngsters toward the adoption of alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs), using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. An internet and face-to face questionnaire survey collects the intensity of knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes toward alternative fuel vehicles of Italian university students. A survey among youngster allows understanding the view of the future generation regarding alternative fuel vehicles technologies. The findings from the survey (n = 330) indicate the relevant determinants that spur the purchase of alternative fuel vehicles, the type of technology preferred among such vehicles, the specific related environmental benefits and the related barriers that youngsters perceive. Consumers' acceptance is crucial in the development of AFVs. This article also includes practical implications for both policymakers and manufacturers.

In recent years, the renewable energy sources (RES) have grown in importance in the energy system of the EU and in the world; it is expected they will grow more and more in importance in the near future. Since the costs of RES technologies are still higher than the technologies derived from fossil fuels, RES are in need of regulatory intervention. There is still uncertainty on the part of political authorities in relation to the type of policy to better manage the evolution of technologies in the RES market. The support mechanism for RES can be divided into price oriented and market oriented. The focus of this chapter is to analyze the RES support mechanisms among the new EU guidelines on state aid for environmental protection and energy 2014–2020 and in particular the transition from some tools (i.e., feed-in tariffs) to others (i.e., feed-in premium) in order to spur the development of RES. We evaluate the “success” of such instruments in relation to adaptation to the times: while feed-in tariffs can fulfill a variety of policy goals, feed-in premium can reach other objectives. We evaluate the effect of RES support mechanisms in relation to the market structure.

The evolution of energy consumption in Europe is going through a profound change in recent years: the incidence of traditional fuels is diminishing gradually in the face of an increase in renewable energy sources (RES). In 2013, the consumption of electricity from RES amounts to 14 % of the total with respect to 6 % in 1997.This chapter provides a quantitative analysis of RES in the EU and the prospect of development of RES under different scenarios. The analysis begins with a description of the technical characteristics of RES and the quantity produced by each source at world level. In Sect. 2.2, the distribution of the three major RES that are wind, solar, and biomass throughout the EU context is analyzed. Section 2.3 provides an analysis of the development of RES in the coming years by different scenarios, both according to the 2014 edition of future scenarios of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in the WEO-2014 and the current EU Climate and Energy Package. Conclusions are drawn in Sect. 2.4.

Energy and environment today are the subjects of a number of initiatives and programs by the European Union (EU). Climate change has become the main pillar of EU policies aimed at accelerating the transition towards sustainable development, a future with low emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). The development of multidisciplinary and multidimensional strategies by the community institutions to face climate change has occurred and is still evolving within a particularly complex system. This chapter provides an analysis on current EU policies, with targets up to 2050, and prior agreements that led to the current ones. The analysis starts from the recent agreement called “roadmap for moving to a competitive low-carbon economy in 2050” promoted by the EU, and focus on the 2030 framework for climate and energy policies presented on January 2014 by the European Commission as an intermediate step to achieve the goal of longer term to 2050. The chapter then proceeds backwards, illustrating the main agreements that have led the EU to the current situation, that are the 2020 climate and energy package and the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol at EU level. Finally, it provides a description of trends in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at global and European levels.

The development of renewable energy sources (RES) is a crucial objective of current economic public policies worldwide. However, high investment costs for producers and difficulties in promoting acceptability among consumers slow down RES efficient diffusion and, therefore, positive actions toward climate change conflict. Government intervention is then necessary to spur RES development and to achieve full potential (Held et al., Energy & Environment, 2006). The aim of our research is to evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive policy scheme in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE). A DSGE is a valid tool for our purposes. In fact, our analysis is focused both on the short-term, through the evaluation of the responses of the key variables when the system is hit by stochastic technology and demand shocks, and on the long-term, through a dynamic simulation of RES and fossil fuel prices by 2050. The incentive scheme is based both on a carbon tax and a stock of public capital, which capture the intensity of government long-term commitment to support new RES developments through investment in infrastructure. We compare this incentive scheme with the standard one based on a flow of monetary subsidies to RES. The DSGE model with three productive sectors is applied to the European Union (EU). The first sector is the final output sector. It produces competitively a Atl Econ J (2015) 43:513–514 DOI 10.1007/s11293-015-9473-3

The evolution of energy production in the European Union (EU) is going through a big change in recent years: the incidence of traditional fuels is diminishing gradually for increasing renewable energy sources (RES), due to international concerns over climate change and for energy security reasons. The aim of this paper is to construct a simulation model that identifies and estimates costs that may arise for a community of negotiating countries from opportunistic behavior of some country when defining environmental policies. In this paper, the model is applied specifically to the new 2030 Framework for Climate and Energy Policies (COM(2014) 0015) (EC, 2014 11) on the promotion of RES that commits EU governments to a common goal to increase the share of RES in final consumption to 27% by 2030. Costs faced by EU countries to achieve the RES target are different due to their endowment heterogeneity, the availability of RES, the diffusion process of cost improvements and the different instruments to support the development of the RES technologies. Given the still undefined participation agreement to reach the new overall RES target by 2030, we want to assess the potential cost penalty induced by free riding behavior. This could stem from some EU country, which avoids complying with the RES Directive. Our policy simulation exercise shows that costs increase more than proportionally with the non-participating country size, measured with GDP and CO2 emissions. Furthermore, we provide a model to analytically assess the likelihood each EU country may have to behave opportunistically within the negotiation process of the new proposal on EU RES targets (COM(2014) 0015).

We study the issue of optimality of policies devoted to environmental goals, building upon the recent and interesting work by Alesina and Passarelli (2010) and extending their analysis to the more general framework set up by Weitzman (The Review of Economic Studies 41: 477-491, 1974). We illustrate instruments that governments have at their disposal to reduce polluting emissions, and we point out the economic implications that may arise from the overlapping regulation through both instruments in the European context. We review the literature on political determination of environmental regulation. On the basis of existing literature, we show that political factors are more important than economic ones in explaining why particular instruments are implemented for certain problems (Hepburn et al. Climate Policy 6: 137–160, 2006). We recognize Alesina’s contribution which states that environmental policy, and the decision to adopt one tool instead of another, is subject to a complex political process. Governments are subject to pressure from politicians, households, and firms because their decisions imply winners and losers. Then, we focus in detail on the work by Alesina and Passarelli (2010) who consider which policy tool and at what level would be chosen by majority voting to reduce polluting emissions; they find out that even if a tax is in general superior to quantity based mechanisms (quotas and tradable permits), the majority may strategically choose a quantity mode in order to charge the minority a larger share of the cost for polluting emissions reduction. We extend Alesina’s analysis, focusing on the optimality of price-based mechanisms, since it is not always the case that price instruments are more efficient than quantity instruments. To this aim, we explicitly make use of Weitzman results (The Review of Economic Studies 41: 477–491, 1974), which suggest that if costs are highly nonlinear compared to benefits, then price-type regulation is more efficient, while if costs are close to linear, then quantity-type regulation is more efficient. We cast Alesina’s analysis in the European context, analyzing potential voting outcomes, assuming that EU countries can be arranged according to different criteria. We find that depending on the empirical distribution of voting countries, Alesina’s voting procedure leads to interesting different outcomes.

The electrical world system is experiencing many challenges, including the increasing presence of renewable energy sources characterized by high variability, the call for actions to mitigate climate change, the need to restructure the infrastructure already aged and then the development of smart grids. Smart grid projects have been launched in various countries around the world. The transition to the smart grid is affecting primarily the European Union and the United States, but also emerging markets such as China and India are strongly investing in the smart grids. In this paper we analyze the socio-economic aspects that are among the key variables towards the feasibility of smart grid projects. Construction of new infrastructures generally rises acceptance problems. Social acceptance of consumers is important for the adoption of new technologies. We advocate that multidisciplinary cooperation is needed to develop scientific research on smart grids.